The Background Story

(Or Why I Do This)

For those of you not familiar with my tradition, every year I like to make a holiday CD to send out with my Christmas cards. It started back in 2000 when I was trying to find a Christmas CD for sale that contained all of my favorite holiday songs. Some had one or two of them, but no CD I could find was a complete collection of the music I liked. Heaven knows there is a lot of crappy Christmas songs out there that always seemed to be intermixed with the good songs. Since this was about the time the original Napster started getting popular, I decided to put together a holiday mix CD of my own.

The next year I dug the CD out again, and as I played it in my car and other places several people heard it and commented on how much they liked it. When I told them I put it together myself, they asked me for a copy. I sent a few close friends a copy of my CD that year in their Christmas cards. As they played it for their friends, they were asked where they got it from. The following year, based on all the requests I received for it, I decided to make copies for all my friends and again send it out with my Christmas cards to all the people who had not received a copy the previous year. I was surprised at how many people took the time to contact me and tell me how much they enjoyed listening to it.

In 2004 I decided to put together another holiday mix, but this one ended up quite different than the first. I tried to find songs and versions of songs that you didn’t hear on the radio everyday. I think I was successful, but I’ll let you be the judge. I distributed it with my Christmas cards again that year, and it was a huge hit. Since then it has become a yearly tradition with new holiday mix albums every year since then. Beginning in 2006 I also began distributing them to friends online.

Past Albums