Because I have a holiday party to prep for on Sunday, this weekend I’m resurrecting/updating a couple classic posts from the Virtual Advent Tour over the years.

I first published a version of this post 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 2022 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.

There are still 20 days left of the Virtual Advent Tour. We’d love to have you join us. Signups are here.

Welcome back for the third day of the Virtual Advent Tour!

Over the years, I’ve shared some of the recipes I associate with the holidays. Often, they date back through the generations. Today, I’m going to share one that my mom found this year and that we tried at Thanksgiving. It was so tasty, I expect it to become a modern family classic.

Cranberry-Brie Puff Pastry Bites (from Parade Magazine)

Ingredients

• 2 sheets puff pastry
• 6 ounces brie
• 1/2 cup cranberry sauce

Preheat your oven to 375°F.

Unroll a sheet of puff pastry onto a cutting board and cut into nine pieces (thirds vertically and horizontally).

Take each piece of puff pastry and tuck it into a mini muffin pan. (I don’t have a mini muffin pan, so will be trying this with a regular muffin pan this weekend.)

Cut the brie into 1″ pieces. (Freezing the brie for 15 minutes beforehand may make this easier, but I can almost guarantee I will never remember to do that.) Put one piece onto each puff pastry rectangle.

Put a spoonful of cranberry sauce onto each piece of brie. We used my mom’s homemade sauce, which has a thick consistency, but the recipe says you can used canned, too. If you want to mix it up, I imagine any thicker jam would work similarly. I bet cherry would be delicious, too.

Repeat with the second sheet of puff pastry.

If you’re using the mini muffin pan, we found we had to pinch the tops of the dough closed in order to get all 18 pieces to not overlap.

Bake for 15 minutes.

Serve as soon as they’ve cooled enough not to burn your mouth or at room temperature. We were able to store them in the fridge overnight and reheat them slightly in the taoster oven the next day.

If you’re enjoying the Virtual Advent Tour, please consider joining us by signing up to post over the next three weeks.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. My supervisor sent us all these lovely boxes of local-to-her chocolates for the holidays.

2. My dad cleared off the pool table this fall, so we got to play for the first time in several years. I lost every game.

3. Staying in Connecticut until Monday evening meant that our drive home was drama-free. Plus, I got to spend that much more time with my folks!

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

Welcome back to the second day of the 2021 Virtual Advent Tour. Today’s host is Bridget at The Ravell’d Sleave. Head over to her blog sometime today to check out her post!

And do consider signing up to write a post or two this month. We’d love to have you join our merry band of elf bloggers.

Thanks for joining us once again for 2021’s version of the Virtual Advent Tour, a tradition that dates back nearly fifteen years.

Today I want to start us off with a Christmas movie review.

Like many people, my family has a long, well-established love affair with Christmas films. We watch the classics every year, as well as movies that are classics to us, digging out VHS tapes recorded in the 1980s of children saving Santa or his reindeer or PIs searching out long-missing grandchildren to reunite with their feisty millionaire grandma.

Last weekend, while up in Connecticut, we streamed a couple films that I could see making future years’ rotations. The first is A Castle for Christmas, which you can find on Netflix.

Starring Brooke Shields and Carey Elwes, the rom-com focuses on best-selling American novelist Sophie Brown (played by Shields). In the wake of her divorce, Sophie has killed off her protagonist’s love interest in an unpopular move with her fans and followed it up with a meltdown on a talk show. To escape the bad publicity and the loneliness of the holidays, she does what any of us would do and books herself a holiday to the tiny Scottish town where her father grew up, hoping to get started on her next book in peace.

We are immediately introduced to a roguish handyman, played by Elwes, who, it turns out is Miles Dunbar, a duke and the nearly broke owner of the local castle. In addition to the tours they’ve been doing and a dusty gift shop, they’ve been forced to start booking events in the hopes of making ends meet, but he’s struggling to keep the bank at bay.

Sophie immediately falls in love with the castle and puts in an offer to buy it. It’s not fully clear how she knows to do this, but perhaps this is the sort of gossip you pick up in the local pub. Miles is resistant, but eventually agrees, with the caveat that she has to move into the castle for 30 days and will forfeit her deposit if she decides to leave. He tells his valet and BFF that once he chases her off (with the coldest, most dilapidated bedroom and a chilly demeanor), they’ll be able to use that money to stay afloat.

But what if his plans don’t work out quite as expected?

Shields and Elwes have good chemistry on screen and seem to enjoy each other’s company. The cast of mostly Scottish actors in the secondary roles are charismatic and endearing and help to draw attention away from Elwes’ over-the-top accent.

The script is a little light, being too eager to jump past the enemies stage and into the romance. So what could have been legitimate impediments to Sophie’s impetuous decision (how does a New Yorker keep a castle from continuing to crumble into disrepair or care for an entire village, particularly if the current duke/handyman has departed?) are easily brushed aside in favor of roaring fires and horse rides in the snow in pursuit of the perfect Christmas tree. But the characters are all so good-hearted and earnest and there are enough moments of humor sprinkled in that you’re eager to overlook that and get back to enjoying it.

The Scottish scenery cements the deal, with sweeping views of a wooded countryside, a quaint village with a cozy pub, and the titular castle. If you had millions of dollars, you’d relocate there too.

If you’ve got access to Netflix, I’d suggest checking it out.

Stop back tomorrow for Day 2 of the Virtual Advent Tour. If you’d like to join our merry band of posters, please sign up here.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl is bookish memories. I don’t know if these are my top ten or just the first ten that came to me, but either way…

1. My grandmother took The Secret Garden out of the library to see if it was the sort of book I might like if she gave it to me. The only problem is that I discovered it at her house, started reading, and then took it out of the library to finish. Luckily, it was a great gift, and I have reread it a number of times.
2. My first grade teacher gave each of us a book for Christmas that year. Mine was The Littlest Angel.
3. When I was very small, my dad left me in the basement of the library to run upstairs and pick out some items for himself. By the time he’d returned, I’d pulled about 100 picture books from the shelves for us to take home, including some that we owned.
4. When the new town library was ready to reopen, a children’s librarian came to our school and read the first chapter of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to us to tempt us into getting our own cards.
5. In high school, I got the opportunity to be part of a group interview of Beverly Donofrio about her book Riding in Cars with Boys at our local library.
6. Nearly a decade ago, I was a Cybils Award judge. It remains one of the coolest things I’ve done, but was such hard work.
7. My parents used to periodically drag us to Whitlock’s Book Barn, a used bookshop, when we were kids. Rudi and I would return willingly many times as young adults.
8. Eliot Schrefer recognized me when I attended his book signing a few years ago. I loved his first y.a. book, Endangered, and had talked it up on the blog. I was carrying a knitting bag with my blog name on it and he noticed it.
9. We attended midnight release parties for the final three Harry Potter novels. The first was at Kramerbooks, which was really less of a party and more of a line since they used to be open pretty much 24 hours a day on weekends back then. We walked home and immediately started reading. The second was at Olsen’s in Bethesda, and we read on the train home. The final was at Politics and Prose, and I dressed up as Professor McGonagall. There were hundreds of attendees, and eventually they had us line up out in the parking lot for our copies.
10. At the very first ALA Convention that I worked, my table was in the very last aisle. It soon became very clear to those of us shunted out to this territory that this was a ridiculously low-traffic area. The guy across the aisle from me was selling the first collection of his web comic set in a public library (Unshelved), and I was trying to give away health books, but we were both working every person who came down the row. After a couple hours, we could give each other’s spiel and were sending anyone we managed to snag across the way to the other’s booth. I don’t remember if we went out after that meeting or if we just caught up at future meetings, but Bill (and his co-author, “Gene”) was often kind enough to invite me to join in the cool graphic novels group at the library conventions. (Writers and editors of health books do not travel in cool packs.)

Hey, bookish readers, would you be interested in taking part in the Virtual Advent Tour that I run? Holiday book reviews are welcome, as are other topics! Details and signups are here.