I’m known for my love of festive Krismas music and I have admitted in the past that when the weather first starts to turn nippy I am overcome by a need to bust out the Krismas albums when I’m by myself in the car. I’m also one of the few people who aren’t all that upset when local radio station WNIC 100.3 starts kicking out the holiday tunes on Thanksgiving Day.

Despite all of that even I can admit that it’s a bit early for a radio station to be broadcasting Krismas music already, but that’s just what WMVN 101.1 in St. Louis is doing:

KSDK—It’s beginning to sound a lot like Christmas, thanks in part to a local radio station.

WMVN 101.1 FM made the switch to Christmas tunes over the weekend. And listeners have had mixed reactions.

NewsChannel 5 asked the station’s programming director about the switch. While he could not talk about why the switch was made now, he said Christmas music has been popular, even this early in the season.

WMVN recently announced plans to change formats. After the holidays, it will program sports related material.

It sounds like a “what the hell why not” way to cut costs in anticipation of the format change by laying off all but a skeleton crew. I can recall more than one format change here in Detroit that resulted in all manner of weird music being played without commercials or DJs for weeks until the change actually happened. And, in all fairness, last year WNIC started broadcasting Krismas music on November 1st, the day after Halloween, and was the first station in the country to do so. They started off only playing it on weekends, but it was only a week or so before they decided to go full-time with it based on feedback they got from listeners. Which is surprising to me because most of the feedback I heard was pretty negative. I suspect they’ll start on November 1st again this year.

But yeah, my personal habits aside, mid-October is definitely too soon. At the very least they should’ve waited until Halloween had passed.