Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and whatever good tidings fill your bill from PopCult and the Larch-Panucci household.

2025 has been a year best left on the trash heap of history.  We began the year writing obituaries for good people, and we ended it writing obituaries for good people. I’d really like to take a year off from doing that.  We’ll try to stay positive while running our traditional holiday greeting. What really sucks is that I just copied and pasted that from last year’s Christmas Day post, and things got even worse on that front this year.

As is our tradition on Christmas Day, we bring you Melanie Larch singing “Ave Maria” from the very first Christmas episode of Radio Free Charleston. This is the twentieth consecutive Christmas that we’ve brought you this clip. It never gets old.

Let’s follow that up with the 2014 Christmas treat that saw Melanie backed by the late and much-loved and missed, Mark Scarpelli…

And we’ll continue with Mel’s 2009 Christmas song with Diablo Blues Band…

Let’s go back to Chicago, in 2019, for one more…

Wishing you and yours the best-

Rudy Panucci and Melanie Larch