Day 25. Christmas Day!<br /><br /><a href="http://www.archive.org/download/PodcastPingsChristmasCalendarDay25/ppcc25.mp3"> <img src ="http://writerpatrick.webs.com/PlayButton.jpg" ></a><br /><br />http://www.archive.org/download/PodcastPingsChristmasCalendarDay25/ppcc25.mp3<br /><br />For this show I have something special. <br /><br />Some people might find the song I chose, “Rainbow Christmas” to have a little too much “rainbow” in it. But it's the sort of song that makes for a big production number that closes out a show and I felt it suitable for that. It's been a long run starting back on December 1st of 25 shows, and there was a lot of work that went into making them even before that.<br /><br />The biggest job was in coming up with enough poetry to fill the shows. And since I only had about five or six Christmas poems, I had to write about twenty. Now writing twenty poems isn't that difficult, but having to make them all tie in with a theme like Christmas--while still keeping them from sounding too much alike--is.<br /><br />This last poem, “How Jamie MacPherson Saved Christmas” is one I wrote some while back. And to make it extra special I decided to have the cast of the Blue Hot Gossip Comedy show read it. Part of this decision was because I had just come off of doing the Halloween episodes and was sort of in a mood for it, but I also wanted the poem to be a little more than just me reading it. <br /><br />Some might notice a similarity of approach as with “A Pickle for Christmas,” the poem I wrote for the Podcast Pickle Christmas skit a couple years ago. I likely would have used this poem for that, but there wasn't enough interest. And in some ways it works out a little better since I know the rhythm of the poem which is thrown off when trying to get a number of people reading it.<br /><br />I've been fortunate that there's not been any major outages with Internet Archive or Blogger. And even though Mininova, where I post the torrentcast, changed over about a week before I was to start, it's turned out to be a big benefit since I'm seeing much higher download numbers than I've seen before. The 24 posted episodes so far have exceeded 42,000 downloads with many individual episodes exceeding 2,500 downloads. It might not be cash, but it helps to make the work worthwhile. <br /><br />This post finishes Podcast Ping's Christmas Calendar. The next one should be the New Year's episode, provided I can get it done. It won't be a regular episode, but I'll explain that more then. <br /><br />Podcast Ping is licensed under Creative Commons, Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0.<br /><br />My online toy shop can be found at <a href="http://patrickjmcnamara.webs.com">http://patrickjmcnamara.webs.com</a>. <br /><br /><a href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=268467426" onclick="this.href = subscribeNowUltra('itpc://'+window.location.host+window.location.pathname,'iTunes');return true"><img border="0" width="100" alt="Subscribe with iTunes" src="http://writerpatrick.webs.com/itunesbutton2.jpg" height="36"/></a><br /><a href="zune://subscribe/?podcast%20ping=http://feeds.feedburner.com/PodcastPing"><img img border="0" width="100" alt="Subscribe with Zune" src="http://writerpatrick.webs.com/zune-1-click-podcast-subscriptions.jpg" height="36"/></a>
