whychristmas?com blog

One of the things I love about Christmas is the music. Over the years the Christmas music on my iPod has grown and grown! Quite a bit of this music is wonderful old 'vintage' Christmas music from the 50s, 60s and before.

Most of these old albums have come from some great sites which offer old, out of copyright, LPs for download. There's some wonderful (and sometimes weird!) Christmas music out there. So I thought I'd share some of my favourite sites for getting this music. So here's a list of my favs:
http://falalalala.com/
http://christmasyuleblog.blogspot.com/
http://christmas-christmasforever.blogspot.com/
http://ernienotbert.blogspot.com/
http://inkydog.blogspot.com/

Over on the Christmas forum I belong to, there are also some thread about old Christmas Music, even more to download and have a listen to! Have a look at:
http://www.mymerrychristmas.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7892

Happy Listening!

Fancy trying to get your tongue around Happy or Merry Christmas in over 70 languages, then head on over to http://yxmas.com/merrychristmas and give it ago!

If you know how to say it in another language, then please contact me - I'd love to add it to the list!

I've added another Carol to the Christmas Karaoke page in the fun section. You can now try crooning along to The Sussex Carol (On Christmas Night, All Christian Sing) as well as your other Christmas favs!

If you know a Christmas song that's not on the page, let me know and I'll try to add it!

whychristmas?com has now been moved on its new hosting and is ready for the big Christmas rush! So tell your friends and family, cos we're all excited about having lots of Christmas fun!

I don't think there was any down time, but if there was - sorry!

So if you want to know about Christmas traditions, customs and much more - visit www.whychristmas.com

Last year (2008) was the busiest ever for whychristmas?com with over 2.4 millions hits in December 2008 alone and the numbers look like they're gonna be up on that for 2009!

So in preparation for the madness (!) the site will be moving to a different server in the next few days.

For the past few years, the site has been hosted at Alphaone Tech - who have been great, especially when i broke several of their servers last year! They're a great host and all my other sites are hosted with them and will contunie to be.

However, for this year and the future I wanted to see if I could find a better solution for all the parties involved.  So, with the help of a great and knowledgeable friend, Joshua Paine, we're moving the site onto a server at Linode. Joshua's throughing some nifty things at the site - so hopefully it will run even faster and be able to cope with a bigger demand.

You might have noticed that the blog has moved as well.  It's now on Posterous at: http://whychristmas.posterous.com/ If you're reading this on the blog feed, that's not changing and will still be: http://feeds.feedburner.com/whychristmas

So please bear with the site in the coming days as there might be some downtime. But you can keep up to date with the blog or on twitter: http://twitter.com/whychristmas

If you don't know what a Rudolph Day is - well it's the 25th of any month! On a Rudolph day you can get aaed with planning for Christmas. Write your Christmas Card list, do some Christmas crafts or it's just a great excuse to play some Christmas Music at any time in the year! And this being the June Rudolph day it's an important one as it's also half way to Christmas! And Yesterday (24th June) it was the celebration of the Birthday of John the Baptist - who was Jesus's cousin. So whatever you do on your Rudolph day - have a good one! (and keep an eye out on the site - more about Rudolph day will hopefully be coming soon!)

whychristmas.com is now on twitter! So please follow the site on @whychristmas If you don't know what twitter is, have a read of the twitter faqs!

whychristmas?com is now KidZui Approved. Kidzui is a special browser (or firefox addon) designed espeically with chidlren in mind. Rather than filter the Internet, KidZui’s founders built an entirely new one. There are over a million websites, pictures and videos in KidZui, all thoroughly reviewed by caring teachers and parents. And now whychristmas?com is part of it!

2008 has been the biggest and busiest year for whychristmas?com ! During December 2007, the site had just over 1,000,000 (one million) 'hits' (pageloads) and about 212,000 visitors. So far in December 2008 (until about noon uk time today - 13th) it's already had over 1,400,000 (1.4 million) 'hits' and 246,000 visitors!  The site has also used about 90gb of bandwidth so far this month! (The whole site is less than 20mb!) Those kind of numbers just blow my mind!!! Thank you to everyone who's visited and the more the merrier!!! (and thank you to my very kind, understanding and excellent hosting company!)

Back in November I posted my entry for the Churches Advertising Network Competition. The results are out and you can see and hear them on the CAN site. Congratulations to all the winners - sadly that doesn't include me :( I love the  'special commentation' for the Revd Taffy Davies, good one Revd Taffy!