eric's little black star » 2008 » November

Archive for November 5th, 2008

eric on Nov 5th 2008 Geeky Things, Info About, Listen, Mix CDs, Music

Update on the Christmas CDs

As mentioned in late August (which, by the way, is the perfect time for making Christmas anything), the Covers to Keep You Warm compilation is finished.

This was quite a bit of fun to do.

To catch you up: for the past two Christmas seasons, instead of buying or making Christmas cards, I have been making mix CDs. The first was a mix of happier Cure songs. The second was 17 Bruce Springsteen songs that mention the name “Mary.”

This year, I ventured a bit off the path and threw together a four CD set of covers. Each “card” has two 80 minute CDs and two 20 minute, 3″ CDs. This makes for about 200 minutes of music.

The first CD is more mellowish with folks like Scott Walker, Simon & Garfunkel and the Handsome Family. The second CD is a bit harder thanks to Henry Rollins, Camper Von Beethoven and Anthrax. The bonus CDs are mostly made up of weirdness like Mrs. Miller, Crispen Glover and Ten Masked Men.

One of my worries is that people won’t know how to play the 3″ CDs. What if they try to play them in their car’s CD player? Bad news, right? Well, I don’t really have an answer there. They’ll play in most computers or CD players with trays. They’ll also play in players that have spindles (like most portable CD players).

Hopefully folks can figure it out.

I’m not really sure when I should mail out the CDs. I looked around online to see when the “traditional” time for sending Christmas cards might be. No clues there. So I shall send them out after Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is the official start to the Christmas season. Nothing should really be done before then. So a few days after Thanksgiving is when the discs will be sent.

Those who got them last year should still get them this year. I have made a few more and have gotten most of my addresses in order.

I was hoping that other folks would see this as a fun thing to do and start doing their own Christmas CDs. Hopefully that will happen this year.

And as in other years, there are zero Christmas songs on the Christmas CDs. These can be played all year long, if you like.

Well anyway, just a heads up.

Here are two more samples from the comp…

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

5 responses so far