SusieJ's Advent Calendar: December 7, 2007

The recipe: S's

As simple to mix as they are to shape, S's are an easy butter cookie rolled into the shape of a — you guesses it — S.

The surprise: The only holiday music feed you'll need

When I asked all my hip, music-loving friends for recommendations for the next big song, a.j., a former WKDU DJ, recommended WOXY's holiday feed. If a punk, post-punk, indie or any other altie-flavor band recorded a Christmas song, you'll find it here, along with Frank and Ella. Best of all, if you like it, you can buy it from that page! Sure, there are some real clunkers, but that's what the mute button is for. (There's an iTunes feature: mute until this song is over.)

How I built my Holiday music collection

In the 80s, Philly had two kinds of rock and roll station: AOR and college (Princeton and Drexel).

WMMR, the station that had an obnoxious, Philly — not New York — DJ for its morning show, would play the top five requested songs of the day at 5:00 p.m. every weekday. It was the standard mixture of hair bands, quasi-metal and harder pop. The AOR stations were in such a rut I got a larger variety of rock and roll by moving to West Virgia.

By mid-December, the station would switch to most-requested Christmas songs. At 4:59, I'd be ready with my boom box and a KMart 90 minute cassette tape. Bowie & Bing, Billy Squier, Joan Jett, Lennon, Bob and Doug MacKenzie. I taped them all, and pulled out that tape every Christmas until making the final switch to CDs (when my boom box finally died).

Anything less than mainstream wasn't even considered. I blame WMMR my not knowing of "Christmas in Hollis." That was (and still is) too "rap" for the straight-jacketed radio formats of my home town.