Yesterday, I did this show with Tom Gilliam, and that’s the thing the algorithms will never understand. Two humans in a room, pulling songs out of the ether, reacting in real time, laughing when a track zigged where we expected a zag. Tom brought his usual mix of deep cuts and quiet conviction, the kind that says I trust this song to hold the room. No branding, no content strategy—just listening, choosing, and letting the music breathe for three hour when the season feels like it’s suffocating everything else.
Every December, the radio loses its damn mind.
The same songs come crawling out of the speakers like embalmed corpses in tinsel: glossy, overproduced, scrubbed of friction, scrubbed of history, scrubbed of anything resembling an actual human feeling. You could swap the station, the city, or the year and never know the difference. Time collapses. Experience flattens. You are trapped in a snow globe, and someone else is shaking it for profit.
And yet—somewhere beneath the jingle-industrial complex—people are still writing holiday songs that don’t sound like they were focus-grouped by a mall. Songs that admit the season is weird, heavy, funny, lonely, joyous, exhausting, and occasionally beautiful in spite of itself. Songs that don’t pretend everyone’s family gets along or that joy arrives on schedule.
That’s where the annual indie holiday show on Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative comes in—not as seasonal programming, but as resistance.
Let’s get one thing straight: this isn’t about “saving Christmas.” Christmas doesn’t need saving. It’s doing just fine, selling sweaters and nostalgia to people who don’t necessarily like each other. This is about rescuing listening from the annual corporate hostage situation. It’s about carving out one afternoon where the holidays sound like actual life instead of a marketing campaign with sleigh bells.
Indie holiday music lives in the cracks. It’s written by people who don’t owe the season anything, which is precisely why it matters. These artists aren’t trying to out-Marathon Mariah or out-smile Bing Crosby. They’re asking different questions. What does winter feel like when you’re broke? What does joy sound like when it’s provisional? What happens when you miss someone who isn’t coming back, or never really came home in the first place?
That’s not anti-holiday. That’s honest.
An annual indie holiday show works because Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative has never been about sonic wallpaper. The show treats music like it has consequences—like it comes from somewhere and goes somewhere else. Dropping an indie holiday show into that tradition doesn’t feel like a novelty episode; it feels like an extension of the show’s moral logic. If you care about music the rest of the year, why would you stop caring in December?
And let’s talk about ritual, because the mainstream gets that part wrong too. Ritual doesn’t mean repetition without thought. That’s just habit dressed up as tradition. Ritual means returning to something because it still tells the truth. An annual indie holiday show isn’t the same playlist every year—it’s the same intention. Same question, new answers. Same season, different weather.
Some years the songs lean hopeful, like they’re daring the future to be better. Other years they’re threadbare, muttering survival strategies over cheap keyboards and acoustic guitars. That fluctuation isn’t a bug—it’s the archive. You can trace cultural mood swings through these songs like tree rings. Pandemic years sound different. Post-pandemic years sound tired in new ways. Political chaos hums under the choruses whether the artists want it to or not.
Mainstream holiday radio pretends time stands still. Indie holiday music documents the fact that it doesn’t.
There’s also something quietly radical about giving these songs space. Holiday tracks by indie artists are usually treated like curios—one-off novelties, seasonal jokes, algorithmic dead ends. But when you put them together in a thoughtful broadcast, they stop being gimmicks and start sounding like what they are: people grappling with tradition in real time. Covers become reinterpretations. Originals become statements. Irony gives way to vulnerability.
And vulnerability, in December, is practically punk rock.
The indie holiday show also creates a temporary community—one that doesn’t require fake cheer or mandatory sentimentality. Listeners aren’t asked to feel a certain way; they’re invited to show up however they are. If you’re happy, great. If you’re barely holding it together, pull up a chair. There’s room for both. That’s a rare offer in a season obsessed with emotional conformity.
Over time, something else happens. Certain songs come back—not because they’re “classics,” but because they earned it. A track that once felt like a lifeline resurfaces years later as a memory. A song that sounded bleak one December suddenly feels tender in hindsight. The show accumulates history. It remembers for you.
That’s not nostalgia. That’s continuity.
There’s a curatorial responsibility here too. Indie holiday music exists in a thousand scattered corners—Bandcamp pages, limited vinyl runs, digital EPs dropped quietly into the void. An annual show gathers those fragments and says, “This matters. Someone heard this. You’re not alone.” That gesture means something in a culture where algorithms decide worth based on velocity instead of resonance.
And make no mistake: this is what independent radio is for. Not scale. Not domination. Presence. Choice. Taste with a point of view. At a time when “discovery” is mostly just machine-generated déjà vu, a human saying “listen to this—here’s why” is a small act of rebellion.
The indie holiday show also refuses the biggest lie of the season: that joy must be loud, uncomplicated, and universally accessible. Indie artists know better. They write about chosen families, fractured homes, grief that sharpens during celebrations, joy that arrives sideways and leaves early. These songs don’t cancel the holidays; they make them survivable.
Which brings us back to Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative. Doing an annual indie holiday show isn’t branding. It’s ethos. It says the show doesn’t clock out when things get messy or sentimental. It says the holidays deserve the same critical attention, curiosity, and care as any other cultural moment.
And maybe that’s the real point. In a world hellbent on smoothing everything into sameness, this show insists on texture. On friction. On humanity. It trusts listeners to handle complexity—and that trust is rare.
So yes, do the indie holiday show. Do it every year. Let it change. Let it argue with itself. Let it contradict the season while still loving it. Let it be strange, sad, funny, and occasionally transcendent.
Because if the holidays are going to mean anything at all, they should at least sound like real people trying to make it through them together.
your tuesday afternoon alternative 