| I love new Christmas music! Mixes of old & new, new artists taking up old favorites…. Anything that helps to set apart December as something different to celebrate Someone special, Jesus. And free is pretty nice, too. Here are my picks for a snowstorm download: Morning star has 2 free Christmas album (yes, the whole CD!!) available for download. Christmas Memories is solo voice, Julie Joyner, singing standards. Very “I’m baking cookies and I want something I can sing along with.” Emmanuel: Christmas Songs Old & New is a couple years old, from a Christmas worship conference. It has that whole “hundreds of people singing along with the worship team” Morningstar feel. I love it, but if you don’t, you know where your delete button is (but I LOVE it!) Here’s the link: http://www.morningstarministries.org/Media/AllMedia.aspx Go about halfway down the page. They have a preview. If you like, right click and “Save Target As…” I renamed them to the CD titles because they have some gobbledy-gook there for the title. They must need it to make the link work. It took like 3 minutes to download because of my connection speed. iTunes. Did you know there is a TON of free stuff on iTunes? And you don’t need an iPod to get it! You can listen on your computer or load it into any MP# player, even burn a CD… IF you don’t have it on your computer already (most new ones do), you can download it at http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/ For the free Christmas music, they will ask you to “Buy it” and you’ll have to set up an account, either with your credit card or PayPal. Fairly straight forward. But it is free, and they put up at least one free Christmas song a week. You can find they free ones near the bottom of the page. Choose to view all free downloads, and pick—Jaci Velasquez, a fabulous version of a choir singing O Come, O Come Emmanuel…. The Carol of the Bells rendition is way cool…. I only skipped on one. Last, but not least, is the free internet radio out there! To get some great links, search “internet radio Christmas” and check it out! Great if you have a cable modem and don’t mind staying online. I had good success with http://www.accuradio.com/holidays/, especially the “Wide Playlist” at the bottom of the page. An ad every few songs, but tolerable. You can turn off artists you don’t want to listen to, and if you don’t like a particular song, hit the double arrow advance button on the right. They show you what CD your music came from, so I finally found out where Price Chopper got that remixed White Christmas with Bing Crosby I love. There are a ton of other channels if you just want standards, or carols, modern Christian songs, jazzy, classical….. You may also want to try http://www.allchristmasinternetradio.com/ but I haven’t listened to that yet. I like the URL name, though. Be blessed in all your listening and warm in this snowstorm. Jesus will see you through every storm in life!
Love, joy, and sugar cookies, --Laura |
