To understand this story, you need to know what a teletype machine is. You may have seen one in old movies in a newspaper office,,,a big black box with paper coming out of the top. It's an electric typewriter that is attached to a national news gathering service Sent through a telephone line. It furnished radio stations and newspapers international, national, and state news for broadcast or newspaper stories. The most famous service was the Associated Press, AP. Back in 1969, I was working at a small Waco radio station as a disc jockey, DJ, and as low man on the totem pole, I had to work midnight to 6AM Christmas Eve. The studio where I played music was simple. We had four turntables that would play 45rpm records and 33 1/3rpm albums, three tape decks to play the commercials, a microphone, and a control board that put all this on the air. This setup faced a small room with a big double pane window. Inside the room was a desk, microphone and a teletype machine. The machine had a bell in it and it would ring different numbers and speeds of rings depending on what stories were being sent "down the wire". Well, I'd been on the air for about an hour when the bell went off on the machine. But, it wasn't an ordinary sequence of rings. I'd never heard a ring like it was doing. It was going, "ding-ding-ding, ding-ding-ding, ding-ding-ding-ding-ding". I went into the newsroom to see what was happening and the machine was typing out the words to "Jingle Bells"!!! Okaaay??? About 20 minutes later, the bell went off again and it typed out "Silent Night" Funny? Then, a little later, it went off again, typing "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen",,,all the time, the bell kept the beat of the song it was typing. Well, I told my listeners about the crazy AP machine and they started calling in saying I was drunk, high or crazy. Soooo, the next time the bell rang, I turned the microphone on in the newsroom to let them here it for themselves. After about 3 hours of this I called the AP bureau in Dallas where we got the feed. I asked the guy there what was going on. I told him how my listeners reacted and that I'd let them hear it for themselves. He asked if I was alone. Yeah. So was he. He said it seemed the news had stopped that night and he was bored so he thought it might be fun to send the songs down the line. After that, he got really creative, typing the words in a bell shape if the song was about a bell, or a Christmas tree, or a star, or Santa himself. He knew there were a lot of DJs spending Christmas alone that night, so he sent a little Christmas cheer.