Happy Chanukah! My five-year-old is running around saying “A Freilichen Chanukah!” to everyone. It’s adorable, since he can *almost* say it, but not completely.

It’s been a long, long, loooooong time since I’ve made a video (this was the last one, two years ago!). I’ve been really wanting to make another one, but there’s always been some reason or other why I haven’t had time/energy/motivation to do so.

Well.

This Chanukah, I said that’s IT! I am going to make a mashup video. I’m going to write it in my bullet journal, and make a plan and this year it is GOING TO HAPPEN. So I wrote it in my planner, and then proceeded to do….nothing.

Until I mentioned to my friend Brocha (hi Brocha) that I wanted to do this video and asked if she had any ugly holiday sweaters I could use for my still-not-started video. She did, and, more importantly, she would sometimes ask me how the video was going (it still wasn’t) and it was that motivation that got me to ACTUALLY MAKE THE VIDEO!

I wanted my kids to be more involved in the recording part, not just the being adorable in the video part. So one night after my two smallest children were asleep, I gathered my oldest three and recorded them making a variety of sounds (much of those sounds were giggling). Then I used those sounds as sound effects/percussive effects in the musical recording. For the clarinet parts, I recording the melodies, and then, since I did not have time to really sit down and write coherent harmonic lines, I just improvised based on the chords of the songs (for instance, one of the chords was a c minor and so I played a minute or two of c minor arpeggios, potential baselines, and some general noodling), and then later, when everyone was sleeping (see the trend here, sleeping kids = time to work on the video), I cut and pasted into something that made sense.

And here it is!