The most wonderful time of the year

I'm an XM Radio subscriber. I first signed up with XM a few years ago, 2004 I think it was, for one basic reason -- XM had practically the entire Major League Baseball schedule. I've never been an every-night listener, but I do appreciate listening to the games called by the local broadcasters. Hey, one can never get enough Vin Scully (Dodgers) or Dave Niehaus (Mariners). And there's nothing like hearing the Red Sox called by some flinty New England voice.

XM offers a lot more, and very recently combined operations with (former) rival satellite radio concern Sirius. I find XM well worth the price.

Last year, holiday season 2007, XM had a raft of Christmas-centric programming -- individual channels for Christmas standards ("your mother's Christmas music", I thought of it), full-blown gospel/praise Christmas music, one channel for Christmas comedy music. I think there were one or two others, plus a channel for Chaunukah music during that festival as well. I'm enough of a sucker for childhood nostalgia that I can appreciate Christmas music -- traditions, some of the tracks -- without feeling clammy after a while. Plus the comedy channel was a riot.

Not so this year. XM is carrying one Christmas channel, "Holly", featuring "contemporary holiday hits". Yeah, fine, the traditional tracks are there, but it is a poor substitute for the 2007 bonanza. And Christmas music suffers from one huge flaw -- a lot of it is crap. There's plenty of good stuff, but given the limited window and narrow band of subject material, pretty much anything that relates to Christmas (which is, no secret, the only holiday involved) will get some airtime no matter how good or bad it is. And there is a lot of awful Christmas music -- either genuinely bad songs, or badly-reinterpreted versions of true classics.

I don't know why XM cut back so severely this year. Maybe the 2007 programming was a flop (is XM even subject to ratings? It's a subscription service). Maybe the recent merger with Sirius put everything in turmoil, and this is what little escaped. Maybe the cratered economy forced the move to reduced programming. Maybe the people at XM are just being grinches. They don't respond to emails except with form-letter replies. (While my XM unit typically remembers whichever channel it was last tuned to, it doesn't do this with the Holly channel, always rebooting to the noxious Preview channel, where you can be told that XM and Sirius are now Sirius-XM, it's great, and you can be told this 24/7.)

So I'm listening, but it was better back in the days of 2007.