Building the Christmas playlist

Building a Christmas playlist is a daunting task. With so many wonderful versions of the literally countless holiday songs, the idea of compiling them all into a playlist seems overwhelming. But, listen to Christmas music we must. The playlist will of course have to vary in selection and in mood, without repeating the same song with only a change in the version or performer. So, how is one to accomplish this all important job?  Sigh, with hard work, time, and organization.  That's the only way.

To begin with, we must organize our holiday music collection into categories.  My chosen category names are Spiritual, Classical, Old Favorites, New Age, Movie Hits, Rockin, Jazz, and Kids. I am careful to put each song into the most fitting category.  This could mean stacking CD's in piles, or boxes labeled for the category, or, in the case of digital copies, creating a playlist folder appropriately labeled to drop them in. For compilations the task is a bit more complicated.  We will have to either put them in a category already created, or, if they are truly a diverse compilation, we may have to make a separate category just for them.

After all the available music is categorized, we then move onto removing songs that are either duplicates or we just don't like them enough to have them in a playlist.  This could involve making a note for each CD, perhaps a sticky note, with the names of the songs we do want, or, removing the digital copies from our playlists.




That is truly the most time intensive part of this job.  Now it's time for the fun part, making our playlists, and yes, I do have more than one.  After all, I'm not always in the mood for the happy, peppy songs like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer or It;s a Marshmallow World.  There are plenty of times I want the playlist to just be soft and cozy feeling.  Other times I may want to hear a variety that moves from one category to another randomly. So, that adds another category, and you can name it anything you want, I prefer to just call it Christmas, with the other specific categories being Christmas Jazz, Christmas Spiritual, etc.  Those are the final playlist names, and if you just want one playlist that contains everything, the job is almost done.

So, now I have my categories sorted, with all duplicates and unwanted songs removed.  Now, make sure you know how much space you have in your music storage device, be it a hard drive or I-pod or what have you. If you don't have enough you will need to clear it for your music, because we all know that the music takes priority.  Something else will just have to go, or be stored elsewhere.

Now comes to time intensive part. Here is where you create the final playlist folders, with the final names you have chosen. With your digital songs you will just be dragging and dropping them from their original folders to the final folders. The CD's will be a slow going process of inserting the CD, selecting the songs you want to download and into the folders you want, and then wait while they move from CD to folder. Lather, rinse, repeat.  Yada yada yada.

After all of your songs are transferred into your final folders I highly recommend backing up your playlists to either an external hard drive or a cloud drive. The last thing you want is to have to repeat this whole process over again if your current hard drive crashes.

And there you go.