[Macworld]

Post your comments for How to exclude holiday tracks from genius playlists here

[gplawhorn]

You could also take advantage of iTunes Match, and simply delete the holiday songs once the New Year rolls around, and download them again at Halloween (when the stores begin playing Christmas music)

[jschaffe]

I have always questioned the use of "Holiday" as the genre name. There are, after all, different and multiple holidays for different religions and cultures. Personally, even for Christmas music, I have Christmas Rock, Christmas Jazz, Christmas New Age, Christmas Classical, and Christmas Vocal, so I can select the mood a bit. All my non-Christmas smart lists include the condition "genre does not contain Christmas" and this makes every day the most wonderful time of the year. ;-)

[LongDec08]

I use this method and it works great on my Mac, although I just shuffle the "holiday" genre instead of using a genus playlist. The problem I have is, even though these tracks are unchecked, I have iTunes Match and they will still play on my iPhone when I shuffle songs. How do I keep iTunes Match from pushing unchecked songs to my devices?

[kevinward76]

@LongDec08 - You could try clicking the 'Sync only checked songs and videos' checkbox in the summary section in iTunes when you have your phone connected. HTH.

[LongDec08]

Thanks Kevinward76. I do have that box checked and it works great for syncing directly to my devices. All my music doesn't fit on my iPhone and iPod so I decided to try iTunes Match and play my music from the cloud. It caused a couple of issues and one of them was playing everything in my library even if they were unchecked. It was such a pain that I went back to syncing directly to each device and reduce the sound quality to get more music to fit.

[darkonturas]

As iTunes does tent to muck around with your changes I find the following rules to be useful for making a holiday smart playlist:

Genre contains Holiday
or Genre Contains Christmas
or Title contains Christmas
or Title contains Santa

This not only allows me to get those two genres but also allows it to snag some christmas songs I have from Jethro Tull, Lady Gaga and Ethra Kit which have the genres of Rock and Vocal.

[fark]

Since Christmas music comes in all kinds I generally leave the Genre alone, but put Holiday into the Grouping tag. And since we have more than one kind of holiday (yes, I consider Halloween to be a Holiday, and no, I don't want to hear Boris Karloff and the Crypt Kickers the rest of the year) I put that in Grouping too, so a given song might be Holiday Christmas and Hip-hop at the same time. I then have a smart playlist with all my Christmas music in it that I keep unchecked for most of the year and turn back on about a week before Christmas.

I use Grouping for a lot of stuff, including country info (like Africa Mali) for world music and kind info for Classical (like Vocal Piano or Quartet).

[sensel]

Keeping holiday (or any) music from your normal music has been a major problem in iTunes from day one.
The solution really should be coming from Apple where a user can segregate holiday (or any other “special” music or sounds like Polka, Tuvan throat singing, monkey cries, Kensington iTrip Stations, etc.) from the other music and iTunes “brain”.
It should happen the moment you buy music from Apple or add MP3s from Amazon or add a CD to your collection and iTunes should be smart enough to notice it and ask “Do you want this album/song/moose call placed in the special Holiday/noise category?”

[sensel]

This is a good idea. I pulled in a dozen more songs. Some in Pop and Jazz Genre! Some in no Genre at all.

[sensel]

Quote

This is a good idea. I pulled in a dozen more songs. Some in Pop and Jazz Genre! Some in no Genre at all.

That was in reference to darkonturas suggestion to add Christmas, Santa… to the Smart Playlist Name (not Title, actually)

Also be sure to set it to “Match any of the following rules.”