The PopCulteer
December 19, 2025

I’m not gonna lie, folks…it’s been a rough week.

So today I’m going to take it easy a bit. I’m making The PopCulteer one of our 12 Posts of Christmas.

Today on The AIR you can hear a very special new AIR XMAS MESS.  This one-hour show, hosted by my beautiful wife, Mel Larch, will run Friday at 10 AM, 1 PM, 5 PM and Midnight, with several additional airings over the next six days as we fold it into our collection of holiday programming on The AIR.  In fact, you can expect The AIR to be mostly Christmas and Holiday specials until the day after Christmas, one week from today. We’ll interrupt that with our marathons of The Swing Shift and MIRRORBALL, but otherwise, we are going into Christmas Spirit Overdrive.

It’s painfully easy to tune in to  The AIR.  To listen to The AIR, you simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay here, and  listen to the cool embedded player found elsewhere on this page.  It’s not rocket science.

Today’s special is our only new Holiday programming this year (with the exception of parts of Radio Free Charleston). It’s been a bit of a struggle to maintain any Christmas spirit in the face of overwhelming loss and a bleak political landscape, but we are going to do our best.

It’s what Knute Rockne would’ve wanted.

What we decided to do is bring you Mel’s favorite Christmas album, 1987’s A Very Special Christmas, and since it’s less than an hour long, we’ve enhanced it with three more very special Christmas songs.

Here’s the playlist for this year’s AIR XMAS MESS…

A Very Special AIR XMAS MESS

“Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” The Pointer Sisters
“Winter Wonderland” Eurythmics
“Do You Hear What I Hear?” Whitney Houston
“Merry Christmas Baby” Bruce Springsteen And The E Street Band
“Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” The Pretenders
“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” John Cougar Mellencamp
“Gabriel’s Message” Sting
“Christmas In Hollis” Run-D.M.C.
“Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” U2
“Santa Baby” Madonna
“The Little Drummer Boy” Bob Seger, The Silver Bullet Band
“Run Rudolph Run” Bryan Adams
“Back Door Santa: Bon Jovi
“The Coventry Carol” Alison Moyet
“Silent Night” Stevie Nicks
“Christmas Wrapping” The Waitresses
“Please Come Home For Christmas” Mel Larch & The Diablo Blues Band
“Christmas Carol” Tom Lehrer

That is it for this week’s PopCulteer. Check, back for fresh content every day, even when we don’t feel like it. We have six more days of our 12 Posts of Christmas, and with any luck, we will find our way back to some semblance of normality soon.