LOTTERY TIME
Last call to get into the lottery for March Xmas
Hey peeps! As you may have noticed we haven’t done the lottery yet, but this is a quick note to say we’ll be doing it in the first week of August, so consider this your last call to get your name in. The link to do so is here or click on our image of the complicated mechanism we use to draw the numbers each year:
As a reminder, here’s what this process looks like:
We will draw 64 numbers from the lottery entry forms and we’ll be in touch to let you know that you’re on the clock to pick a song. You can pick whatever song you want as long as it satisfies the tournament metrics: this year it has to be a seasonal song in some way, available on youtube (even if you put it there), and a specific rendition of a song. So you can’t just choose “White Christmas”; you will have to select a particular recording or performance that is available on streaming/online. And it has to be 10+ years old as of December 2026 (a decade is the minimum distance we think necessary to be able to see something clearly). If the artist already has a song in the competition selected by someone else, then it’s ineligible.
If your number gets selected, you have a day or two to get back to us to confirm. We’ll ask you to send a ranked list of your top 3 (or more) choices.
Essays will be due at the beginning of November.
You can change your song later, up until around October, when we’ll do the bracket.
If you wrote for the tournament last year, you have a disadvantage in the lottery (to encourage more turnover year to year so it’s not just the same kewl kids writing each year). If you have never written a tourney essay for us before, you have an advantage, as we reserve 16 spots each year for new writers. If you have written an extracurricular or came off the bench as a pinch hitter in the past, you get a little bump in your chances for being a good member of Xness.
The Selection Committee doesn’t get free entries either; we too have to get lucky in the lottery.
And here’s our end-of-summer 2026 playlist if you wanna give it a listen. Youtube version / Apple music version. We’re excited about a lot of these songs, which are mostly new to us. We hope you dig em too.
We have one more sadness extracurricular to drop on you before we switch over into full March Xmas prep mode, so watch your inboxes for that.
Here’s that lottery entry form one more time before we close! Spread the word to folks you think might like to be part of this weird thing we do once a year!
Ander