Hey Blog people! Sitting here on the tail end of another Christmas Season and as always - feeling blessed and grateful to all of you for making this an awesome Christmas this year! Let me start with a  quick post from The Praise Venue at Saddleback Church - services last weekend included 3 features that have been uploaded to you tube and I share them here. 

The first is from the classic Charlie Brown Christmas Special that marked the beginning of the season from when I was a little dude - Christmas Time Is Here!! I recorded this classic on my CD - Is It Christmas Yet? and the disc started with my then 5 year old little girl asking, "Daddy, is it Christmas yet??"

Here is the live version from Saddleback Services, Sunday December 19th, 2010 --

We then did Away in a Manger from that same CD.

I loved getting a chance to perform with my little girl - Vanessa Vail!

I gave her the option of singing Silent Night as a prelude to the band or singing it with the band with the bluesy feel we did on my CD and she wanted to sing with the band! I was so excited to have her actually sing with the band and that she is such a natural in front of people! No FEAR! Love that!!

Isn't that cool! Love my baby and love when people give us the space to grow gifts in our little people!

So - Saddleback Praise was a blast! This month included Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services at Saddleback, the Newport Beach Boat Parade, holiday parties, my Pro Jam with a Christmas theme, new video posts for Christmas on YouTube, a Dean Grech original Christmas track that I did a video for and it went to 20,000 views in the few weeks before Christmas, a few Christmas shows in clubs and all started off playing Deck the Halls from Christmas Hymns for former president George Bush at Saddleback's Civil Forum!

The Civil Forum Video - Deck the Halls

It was an awesome Christmas in Southern California and huge cool strides were made all around!

I had started working Christmas back in the beginning of Summer with new web sites, updates on the old sites, a new Penny Whistle track recorded and later video posted of the George Bush forum and the Penny Whistle video clips. Video stats have been pushing 5 thousand views a day with all the Christmas search added into the usual video views from my video site and you tube. It has been an amazing, blockbuster month of web activity.

The New Penny Whistle Feature - Do You Hear What I Hear?

The Christmas Sites are many - Smooth Jazz Christmas dotcom, Christmas Sax dotcom, Christmas Hymns dotcom, Christmas CDs dotnet, Christmas Songs dotCC, Christmas Jazz dotcom and Christmas Socials on Face Book and My Space rounded out the old Greg Vail dotcom website that has always been a huge draw for Christmas Searches online. Greg Vail dotcom alone did over 23,000 pages in December! 

Video Views on YouTube of the Christmas Videos was pretty amazing! A good guess with stats averaged show about 40,000 Christmas Video Views from December 1 thru December 25!! The big clips were the new clips. The Forum clip went nuts for a few days with over a thousand views a day but settled down. The big hit was the Dean Grech Clip - What Do You Want This Year for Christmas??

Pretty amazing to see Dean's new song do so good! The last couple of days the views have been over a thousand a day and the big day hit over 1600 views IN a DAY! 

The older Christmas sites did tons of traffic this year! The new sites did OK but are new and need to get the GOOGLE blessings to fall where I know they belong in the Search results. New Sites were Christmas Jazz dotcom and Christmas Songs dotCC - all the others just went nuts and broke past year performance by almost doubling the numbers! 

ALL THIS TO SAY - I am blown away yet again this Christmas! Every record was broke at Greg Vail Music and online with the exception of my main site search numbers being about 2 thousand pages down from last years peak. We had a server issue and all the new sites did move in on the search placement so that was to be expected. Many search terms had Greg Vail dotcom down to page 2 on GOOGLE because the new sites were killing so hard on the optimization for that sites nitch market. 

Done being a tech geek - Just wanted to wrap on an amazing Christmas that broke almost every record and dominated the world online in every market! Wish I was rich with cash as I am with blessings!

Over the next few days we have to close out 2010. Tax records - receipts - Sales - stats - mileage - bank records - CD inventory - AND - close out Christmas on 20 sites online - pull Christmas banners and Sales - set up sites for Christmas 2011. Once they is cleaned they sit till summer and it all starts again......