Here we are, in the dead zone between Christmas and New Year. Seems like as good a time as any to post the recap no-one needed. Or wanted. Yes, I'm going to debrief myself on how the 2025 Inventory Full Advent Calendar went. If you're ever in need of an example of pointless, self-indulgent navel-gazing, feel free to re-direct to this post.
As I may have mentioned before (Oh, I definitely have.) the one thing I don't enjoy about doing the annual musical door-opening extravaganza is not being able to keep up a running commentary as I go. It's hard work staying quiet, I can tell you.
I have a little leeway to offer passing observations, thanks to Redbeard commenting every day. It's turned into something of a regular double act after several years and at least it gives me the opportunity to say something about the songs.
While I'm on the subject, thanks also to Tipa, the only other reader to leave any comments at all this year. Jolly good ones, too.
Even if only two people enjoyed it, I'd feel it was a worthwhile exercise, but of course there were three because I had a great time putting it together. I imagine it's no secret I'm mainly doing it for my own amusement.
It's so much fun every year that I'm always tempted to consider creating a new blog just so I can go on doing it. One where I'd post a song every day of the year. It would be so easy and so much fun. I imagine. Maybe the reality would be a bit different...
It's not as though it was just the three of us having our own private door-opening party all December, anyway. Page views for the Calendar were very consistent throughout the run; lower than on regular posts but still close to three figures, most of the time. I have no way of knowing how many of those page views also incremented the relevant YouTube counters but let's hope a few people clicked through out of curiosity, at least.
I'm not actually going to say much about the music in this post. I might cover that separately at some point, although that might be a self-indulgence too far. What I'm going to go into here is the way the posts were illustrated.
I can chip in a bit about the song choices but no-one ever mentions the pictures so I rarely get the chance to talk about them when replying to comments, which is ironic, given that's the part of the whole thing that takes me the longest and requires the most effort.
Let me take a step back and outline my methodology. The way I tend to compose the calendar most years goes like this:
Stage 1. October going into November: trawl the internet for Christmas songs and find more than I'm ever going to need.
Stage 2. Mid-November: Mentally sort them into Possibles and Probables. Check I haven't used any of them in previous years. Start thinking about images. Decide on were and how to source those. Begin collecting and/or producing them.
Stage 3. Late November: Begin putting the first week's posts together so as to have at least a week in hand, going into December. This means picking some of the songs, finding appropriate images to go with them and editing those images if needed.
Stage 4. December: Keep producing posts, trying to stay at least a few days ahead but also start swapping everything around, bringing in new songs that weren't on the longlist, pairing songs thematically, developing themes on the fly and basically winging it more and more the further into the month it gets. This is when it starts to be really fun.
I never stop looking for new Christmas songs. Any good, new ones I find can always be added on the fly. Pictures are open to a certain amount of serendipity but it's a lot more constrained. Once I decide on the aesthetic and the source, that has to stay consistent for the whole Calendar.
Unlike music, the use of images on the blog is fraught with concern. For music and video, YouTube covers all the liabilities automatically. So as long as I just embed videos correctly, using the tool included in Blogger for that purpose, there's no risk. Everything stays firmly inside Google's eco-system, where the issues of copyright are handled by the terms of your YouTube account.
It's why, in the rare instance when I want to use something that isn't on YouTube already, I prefer to upload it to my YouTube channel and link to it from there, rather than upload it directly to Blogger from my own hard drive. It's a form of data-washing, I guess.
With images, it's riskier. Even with screenshots from games that you may have taken yourself, ownership is often unclear. Blatant "borrowing" from the web is like skipping across a minefield.
The most important thing is not to step heavily and inconsiderately on anyone's copyright, while also not paying anyone any money. Harder than you might think, especially when it comes to finding a couple of dozen Christmas and winter pictures to stick at the top of a post.
I've used my own photographs in the past, which is probably both the safest and the most aesthetically satisfying choice, but I only have so many suitable shots and I've pretty much run through them all now, so that was out for this year. If we'd had any snow, I might have taken some new ones but we hardly ever get snow here before January, if at all.
We do have one hell of a lot of sparkling lights up all over town, though. Next time, I might take some pictures of those. I could probably take twenty-five unique shots just in the cul-de-sac across the road.
For the first Advent Calendar, which I put together without a great deal of thought, I used copyright-free stock images. They were really not very pleasant to look at but I leaned into the cheese and tried to make it a feature.
I did consider doing that again this year but if you search for "copyright free images" you may be surprised to find how little "free" choice you actually have. Nearly every site that offers them requires at least some kind of sign-up and some want some kind of subscription, too. I looked at it and decided it wasn't going to work.
Better yet, you can very easily tailor the image to the music, either by prompting specifically for something you think would go with it thematically or by using an extract from the lyric as a prompt. I do like to do that. It's like a parlor game.
In 2023 and 2024 I used AI for the Calendar, either exclusively or partially. The models weren't as good then as they are now, but looking back at those pictures today, I still quite like most of them. Honestly, I'd be happy to have used AI again this year, too. Prompting for AI would have been easier, faster and at least as entertaining for me than what I did end up doing.
But using AI is not without controversy, as you may have noticed. And the Calendar is supposed to be a bit of holiday fun, not a seasonal wind-up. Why piss even a few people off unnecessarily by summoning the specter to the feast?
That's when I hit on the idea of going Pubic Domain. That would be safe enough, wouldn't it? And easy, too.
Yeah. Not so much as you might think. Most of the sites offering "PD" images also want you to make an account before you can get to the good stuff which, judging by the samples they let you see, might not even be that good anyway. Plus they often have a lot of small print about what you can and can't do with the images, too. I did use a few of those sources at the beginning but it was not much fun at all.
And then I stumbled upon Wikimedia Commons. That's where about two-thirds of the images I eventually went with came from.
It was a very lucky stumble. Not only does the site have a huge archive but it's user-friendly and very well-organized. There's a search function that really works, the images are displayed in a way that makes it very easy to spot something suitable right away and best of all, they've done all of the admin for you.
They tell you everything you need to know about the provenance of the image, what you can and can't do with it and what credit you need to give if you use it. Not only that, they provide all of that information in various formats, including html code ready to drop into your post as-is. All I had to do was cut and paste into Blogger and it worked perfectly every time.
That's why the latter half of the calendar has those neat attributions tucked away at the bottom of every page, where the earlier ones have ugly, fudged attempts, all done by me. The premades saved me so much time and effort.
Once I discovered that mother-lode, the mechanics were easy. What wasn't was matching a suitable image with the music. Geez, that was a thankless task, alright.
First I had to figure out what sort of image I wanted.
For example, on Day 10 I wanted to pair two songs that name-checked specific American retail outlets and restaurants with an image of a named American retail outlet or restaurant at Christmas or in winter. Didn't have to be the ones in the songs, Denny's or K-Mart. Any name I recognized would have done.
Could I find a public domain image to fit that brief? Could I Christmas!
Eventually I did but it took me ages and in the end I had to settle for a store I'd never heard of - Pick 'n Save. It sounded right and the image was certainly seasonal. Just as well. I couldn't find any others.
It was a little like that every day, although that was one of the hardest. Believe it or not, all the images are thematically linked to the titles or the lyrics of the song or songs of that day. Granted, the connections are pretty loose, especially in the first week, when I was still using a bunch of images I'd downloaded in November, but I soon dumped those and started looking for appropriate images after I'd picked the songs, not before. That went better.
It was fun-ish. I mostly did it late at night in bed on the laptop. It took me maybe half an hour each time.
There was minimal editing. Mostly I took the images as they came. Occasionally I made some minor changes. I took the "Midwest National Parks" logo off the bottom of Day 23 because I decided only one of the three songs qualified as midwest emo. I cropped the Murad cigarette ad for Day 18 and also saturated the colors a little.
It was a lot of work. If I'd used AI, would it have been faster? Almost certainly. Better, though?
Take that problematic Day 10. I'd have ended up with something like, oh, I dunno... that picture up at the top of the post, maybe? Is that better? Worse? About the same?
Hard to say, isn't it? I really like the Public Domain shot. It has a lot of the bleakness of Communist Daughter's cover of Christmas at Denny's (The original, by Randy Stonehill, doesn't carry a fraction of the weight, for me.) but then it doesn't do much for Root Boy Slim and the Sex Change Band. I don't think I want to see what AI would have done with that, either.
As for Eels and Birdcloud and their collective Christmas cool, I might have gotten something like this:
So, yeah,. maybe the AI image generators haven't improved as much as I thought. And maybe I would have had to just as much work to get something I was willing to use, even if I had taken the supposedly easy option.
In the end, I was happy enough with what I got from the Public Domain and I know there's plenty more waiting if I need to go back for more.
Next year, though, I kinda think I might take some photos of my own. Hey! Maybe I should use all original, hand-taken pictures but make the songs with AI!
That is something AI is good at, after all.
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