Happy Solstice, everyone! By this evening, we’ll have passed the shortest day of the year and be on our way to lighter times once more. Hold onto that fact with both hands if you need to. You’re nearly there.

Also, somehow I got distracted and did not wish any of our readers who celebrate a Happy Hanukkah. I hope the first three nights have treated you well.

Are you a fan of the Peanuts’ Christmas special? I can remember being allowed to stay up late and it being so memorable that I can tell you that the sponsors when I was a kid were McDonald’s and Peppermint Patty.

If you have equally strong memories about the special, head over to Rudi at Random Duck, where he’s got some of the back story on that special and the soundtrack to it by Vince Guaraldi.

Three more days, folks. We’ve got this.

The advantage of living with someone with a blog is that they can take a look at you and decide the easiest and kindest thing they can do is to take another post from your holiday to-do list.

Which means I’m sending you back across the living room to Rudi at Random Duck for some more weird, but mostly wonderful, Christmas tunes for today’s stop on the Virtual Advent Tour.

Because we’re planning to head north on Wednesday, our earliest departure in years, I’m defaulting to updating a classic post, first published in 2010:

Christmas music is as intrinsic a part of my holiday season as is a tree or presents. Each year my family looks to see who has new holiday albums coming out and breaks out the old favorites from years past. Each of us has a pretty sizable collection of Christmas albums crossing genre and spanning a variety of delivery formats from LP to 8-track to mp3.

My dad used to make an annual Christmas mix. He made a few Christmas tapes when I was growing up, but making it a yearly event definitely became much more feasible once you could build your playlist on the computer and then burn it to disc. Each year you eagerly look forward to seeing what he’s included on his holiday cd.

After making a few gift tapes myself back in college, I found the process to be a lot of work and stopped making mixes. But the allure remained and, after mulling it over for a couple of seasons, I resumed making mixes about a dozen years back. It’s a surprisingly involved process if you’re like me and prone to getting a bit obsessive about getting your mix just so. But I thought today, in honor of being a stop on the Virtual Advent Tour, that I could offer some insights into creating a Christmas mix that you and your loved ones will enjoy for years to come:

• Start with a wide selection of music. It helps to have a collection of cds, records, or mp3s from which to draw. It is not imperative, however, as you can find plenty of holiday tunes online from which to draw. Clearly, free options are your friend, particularly if you’re starting from scratch.
• Begin early. Prep now for next year. Just create a playlist labeled Christmas 2023 in your preferred music playing program and dump songs you like there. Consider this your vault. It’s not too late to create one for this year, but if you want one done by Dec. 25th, don’t wait!
• Song selection is key. Here are my rules. Obviously yours will vary by taste and inclination:
• I like to keep it pretty even between male and female singers. That’s a personal preference because I definitely notice when a mix slants one direction or another. (Although, usually I find that if there’s a noticeable bias it tends to be toward the mix creator including a mostly male line-up.)
• Shorter songs are preferable. Aim for roughly three and a half minutes per song. Older songs are usually shorter; more modern ones tend toward the five-plus minute mark. I’m not saying to exclude long songs, although I try to keep those to a minimum. Christmas songs tend to get a bit repetitive and the longer one goes on, the easier it is to get tired of it. Plus, if you choose to burn your mix as a cd and you pick long songs, you get to include fewer songs.

• Include some artists you love even outside Christmas. You might decide only to include artists you listen to year-round, but I tend also to add artists I’m not familiar with who have songs I find very catchy.
• Find a balance between modern and traditional holiday music. By traditional I’m referring to songs everyone can sing along to. Marvin Gaye’s “Purple Snowflakes” is a song you can groove along to, but it’s not one that’s likely to get a carload of people singing along with it on first listen. But those unique tracks tend to be ones that people remember because, honestly, nearly every singer with a Christmas album has done a version of “Silent Night.” (I also like to throw in an instrumental or two. If your audience’s attention has wandered, a lack of vocals can help recall it to your mix.)

• Once you’ve assembled a collection of songs you like, it’s time to start playing with them. First, know your target number. If you’re putting this mix on a cd, you have 79 minutes to play with. If you’ve picked mostly longer songs, that’s probably 15 tracks. If you’ve gone with shorter pieces, you could get 20 or more songs on the cd. But it’s good to check this number regularly because there’s nothing worse than putting together a mix you love only to find that the last five songs aren’t going to fit on.
• I find it’s important to get your first and last songs right. The first song needs to draw your audience in, so I like an upbeat song to get you started. And the final song is that last taste you’re leaving people with. I like something a bit quieter here to send your listener out on a peaceful note. “Silent Night” would be a good choice here or “O Holy Night.”

• In between those I try to alternate every couple of songs, upbeat for a couple, then slow for one or two. Listen to your mix several times. If you find you’ve stopped hearing it or you get bored, move your songs around to create better transitions or bump the song that bored you. Sometimes a song sounds perfect by itself but just refuses to play nicely with any of its neighboring tunes.
• Finally, don’t forget to come up with a catchy title for your mix and artwork for it if you’re making cds.

• And, as with any holiday endeavor, try to remember you’re doing this because it’s fun and you like Christmas music. If it becomes too much of a hassle, by all means stop. There’s nothing wrong with just putting albums on the stereo or computer or listening to an all-Christmas radio station. This way gives you a unique and special holiday mix, but it’s definitely less important than spending time with your loved ones. And there’s always next year.

Don’t panic folks, but we have one week left until the big day. You can do it. Pick one thing on your to-do list and cross it off today. I believe in you.

Today, I’m sending you back out on the road for a tour stop at Staircase Wit. Constance has a review (and giveaway) for you of a Christmas-themed novel, which you could pick up today and read while eating delicious holiday treats. (Trust me, I’m reading it now. You’ll want a cookie or two on hand and maybe a glass of egg nog!)

Today the tour is on foot through the Georgetown neighborhood of D.C. Rudi and I found ourselves with a free evening, so we headed out to check out this year’s Georgetown Glow light installation.

This nighttime extravaganza of light, video, color, and interactivity is in its eighth year, and while this year covered less ground than some previous years, it was still lots of fun with five pieces around the waterfront and shopping district of the neighborhood.

First up on M Street was “Light Falls” by Leandro Mendes-Vigas, a light and sound installation designed to recall Mendes-Vigas’ Brazilian Amazon rainforest and cleverly concocted out of two stories’ worth of duct hoses:

Threading our way past construction, rowdy students taking a break from finals, and closed storefronts, Rudi and I headed toward the river. At the entrance to Washington Harbor, we found our first interactive display with “Picto Sender Machine,” by Felipe Prado:

At first, it just looks like a color-changing display of screens, which would have been fun enough on its own. But then you read the sign and realize that you can do this with it:

After playing for a bit, we walked along the Potomac over to where the fountain is during the summer to get to our third installation, Alicia Eggert’s “All the Light You See”:

We head up Wisconsin Avenue to the Episcopalian Church, where we found a yard of butterflies:

Masamichi Shimada’s “Butterfly Effect” is probably the most subtle of the light displays, with the various panels on the butterfly wings shifting through bluish-purply hues over time, but it was very pretty.

Rather than stay on the street to get to the final Georgetown Glow installation, we crossed the bridge by Georgetown Park (kind of a weird mall-ish space, but also the spot where Andre Agassi literally ran into my mother) and their light display:

On the other side of the mall, we reached the final installation, another fun interactive one:

Cloud swings! The one I opted to grab wasn’t working properly, but if you swung on the other two, they changed from white to varying colors and brightness depending on how fast and hard you moved. “The Cloud Swing” was created by Lindsay Glatz and Curious Form.

Thanks for coming along with us on our tour of Georgetown Glow!

Here are the initials of the titles of 25 conventional Christmas tunes. Can you figure them all out? (All initials are capitalized, regardless of whether the word should be in the title.)

1. OCT
2. JTTW
3. GKW
4. SN
5. OCAYF
6. TLDB
7. GTIOTM
8. TFN
9. FTS
10. HTHAS
11. OHN
12. RTRNR
13. OLTOB
14. SB
15. AIAM
16. IHTBOCD
17. DTH
18. JB
19. AWHHOH
20. GRYMG
21. WCIT
22. SCICTT
23. UOTH
24. WC
25. ITMWTOTY

I’ll post the answers over the weekend. Have fun!