Christmas music radio

Christmas music radio (also known as all-Christmas or festive) is a music radio format devoted to the playing of Christmas music.

Christmas music is a seasonal radio format. Radio stations that adopt the format traditionally carry some other format throughout the majority of the year (most commonly adult contemporary music or contemporary Christian music), then drop that format entirely and switch exclusively to Christmas music for the holiday season. At minimum, the all-Christmas format runs through Advent and Christmas Day, with most stations playing the format for a large portion of November and often continuing more limited Christmas music for the week after Christmas.

The Christmas music radio format has its own core artists and songs, independent of whatever format the station normally runs; most stations mix this core with records more in line with their standard format. In the United States, this core consists of records substantially older than any commonly used radio format, with a large body of records dating to the 1940s through the early 1960s—an era that had otherwise largely been abandoned by mainstream radio formats by the early 2020s—remaining among the format's most popular. Canada and the United Kingdom generally draw upon records from the classic hits eras of the 1970s and 1980s.