• The Beatles Fan Club in 1963 had a deluge of fan mail where on average they were three weeks behind in answering back to the fans. This created problems in terms of "efficiently responding back" to those fans as well their own 30,000 "Official Fan Club Members." Tony Barrow became acutely aware of the problem, so what to do? Well, Tony recalled how the Queen Mother always delivered her Christmas Message to her subjects every year on the December 25th. Presto! Why not have the Beatles do the same for their fans but send it out on a record just before Christmas?

Tony Barrow decided to approach Brian Epstein on the idea. Brian more or less shunned it because he felt it was going to "cost the Beatles" more in the long run to finance the singles as a gift to their fan club members. However, Tony was not disheartened by Epstein's opinion on the matter. Tony then decided to talk to the Beatles about the proposal to which all four musicians thought it a great idea! The Beatles then talked to Brian Esptein about the merits concerning Tony's idea. Needless to say, Brian had no choice but to now agree since it was being sanctioned by John, Paul, George and Ringo.

And so the Beatle Fan Club Members got their first Beatle Xmas message in 1963. Bet you all thought that the Beatles wrote the the message themselves for their fans? Wrong! In fact the first three Xmas messages were more or less scripted by Tony Barrow with the idea that the Beatles "ad-lib humor" might prevail along the way as they're reading it (ie: one of the boys goosing another one or whistling the queens anthem are a couple of examples Tony refers to).

Interestingly enough, the first three Beatle Xmas records -- that is, 1963, 1964 and 1965 were all recorded at EMI studios at the end of their recording sessions. By 1966, the Beatles took a totally different approach to their next Xmas message. Mainly Paul McCartney's idea, the recording of this message had quite a few firsts for itself: First of all, it was to be "Pantomime" - an idea Paul came up with as opposed to the usual "happy greetings and Xmas goodwill" found on the previous three Xmas messages. Secondly, the record became the first Xmas record to be double-sided. Thirdly, the sleeve cover was done in color for the first time! Fourthly (and a bit of surprise here for this fan), the Beatles recorded this message at their publishers studios...that's right, in Dick James' studios in 1966! A departure here for the Beatles since they previously recorded their Fan Club messages after a recording session. The Xmas recording was approached from a "production" point of view - the first time the Beatles decided to record their Xmas message that way.

The Beatles Xmas message for 1967 brought in a satirical humor based on radio and television and created a Xmas record that was amost like a radio play. However, in the final mixdown stage, they just sang "Christmas time is here again" for 6 minutes and the rest was never used.

In 1968, the Beatles were not working well together and they recorded "separate Xmas messages" to be "edited together." The lucky person who got to do this envious task of producing and editing was none other than Kenny Everett - a London disc jockey. Basically, Ken took the recordings back to the BBC radio and did some special mixing which still gave the impression of Beatles doing another great fan club message. But in the 1969 Xmas message, Kenny Everett's efforts were more constrained by the lack of input from George Harrison - who only spoke a mere 6 seconds on the record and Ringo, only a mere16 seconds - made the Beatles last Xmas message appear far less of a group effort at all. Once again, this record was mixed by Kenny Everett using some musical files from the BBC library to help pad out what was to be the Beatles last Official Christmas Fan Club Record.