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Radio D.J.

Holiday Show That’s Rockin’ Round the Clock

PLAYING FAVORITES Jon Solomon puts on his holiday radio show every year, going from 6 p.m. Dec. 24 to 6 p.m. Dec. 25.Credit...Laura Pedrick for The New York Times

PRINCETON

BING CROSBY is classic. The Chipmunks, certainly, are not without their charms. And the sentiment behind John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” may seem especially apt this year. But sometimes you just want to hear National Lampoon’s “Kung Fu Christmas” when December rolls around.

Or at least some people do, and for them there is Jon Solomon.

Mr. Solomon has been the host of “Jon Solomon’s Annual 24-Hour Holiday Radio Show” at WPRB-FM, the Princeton University station, since 1988, when he was 15. Besides “Kung Fu Christmas,” listeners who tune in from 6 p.m. on Dec. 24 to 6 p.m. on Dec. 25 are bound to hear everything from a version of “The 12 Days of Christmas” that makes sense only to fans of the 1980s-era Cleveland Browns to a car-horn-honk rendition of “Frosty the Snowman” to a funky, hard-to-find cut by Blondie and Fab Five Freddie called “Yuletide Throwdown.”

Between on-air bantering and chatting with callers, Mr. Solomon said he played roughly 360 songs — most of them new or freshly unearthed — during each year’s marathon; requests account for as many as a third of them.

“Just don’t expect me to play Adam Sandler’s ‘Hanukkah Song,’” said Mr. Solomon, 34, from his WPRB cubicle recently before the start of his weekly rock show, “Keeping Score at Home,” heard Wednesday evenings from 7 to 10. Such songs, he suggested, are too pedestrian.

The audience for the holiday show has not been determined; Mr. Solomon guesses it is in the tens of thousands, including online listeners who check in from as far as Singapore and diehards who call in every year and camp out next to their radios for the duration.

Besides his weekly rock show at WPRB, Mr. Solomon reports on Princeton University’s men’s basketball for princetonbasketball.com, an independent Web site; operates two independent record labels, My Pal God and Comedy Minus One, and plays host to a biweekly podcast on Philadelphia-area musicians.

It is arguably the holiday show, however, that has brought Mr. Solomon the most attention, earning him a reputation as something of a Christmas song savant. The music blog Idolator.com now counts on him to post an annual musical advent calendar featuring his favorite obscure finds for 12 days in December (look for the Swimmers’ “Christmas Sound,” a new favorite, this year), and he is also among the most important figures in a documentary in progress, “Jingle Bell Rocks,” by the Vancouver-based independent filmmaker Mitchell Kezin.

Mr. Kezin plans to fly to Princeton this year to film the program from start to finish. When Mr. Solomon is typically at his punchiest — “around 10 a.m. to noon, when I want to arm wrestle to keep the energy up before the last five hours of the show, which is all adrenaline” — he will be grateful for the company, he said.

“Jon’s show fills a need among many adults to have totally off-the-wall fun on Christmas,” Mr. Kezin said in a telephone interview. “It’s escapist but also very sincere, a way for people who love alternative music of all genres to connect that’s not attached to any particular religious belief.”

Coincidentally, Mr. Solomon, who lives in Lawrenceville, is Jewish and said the show’s origins owe themselves in part to that fact: “When I started, people were relieved that they didn’t have to do the shift. To me it was a great opportunity, and I didn’t celebrate Christmas anyway.”

Now, though he missed a year of being the host in 1996 when he had just finished a degree in radio and television at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and was driving cross-country as a graduation trip, he can’t imagine a Dec. 25 without it. Some of the most important events of his life, like the 2002 installment when he proposed to his wife, Nicole Scheller, have taken place during the show.

And though it sometimes means dusting off unfortunate rarities for curious listener requests — Mr. Solomon has played troubling titles like “Black Christmas” by the metal band Venom, with its dark and menacing lyrics — the program has opened his eyes, he said, to the true spirit of the holiday.

One time toward 6 p.m. on a Dec. 25 when he was exhausted, he recounted, a listener goaded a very young child into calling. “The little kid said, ‘Thank you for the radio show,’ and I almost started bawling,” Mr. Solomon said.

“When it’s over, I feel like Bill Murray at the end of the movie ‘Scrooged.’ You don’t ever want the feeling to die.”

A correction was made on 
Feb. 10, 2008

An article on Dec. 16 about Jon Solomon, who is the host of a 24-hour holiday radio show for WPRB-FM at Princeton University, referred incorrectly to Mr. Solomon’s coverage of men’s basketball at the university. He reports for a Web site, princetonbasketball.com, not the radio station.

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