here's the thing:

All Yuletide requests are now visible:
-at karanguni's app
-at the Yuletide 2025 collection on AO3
-in a spreadsheet
-in a text doc

Please check back later for pinch hitter prompts.

Enjoy!

Both the main Yuletide 2025 collection and the Yuletide Madness 2025 collection are open for posting works. Before posting your assignment, or posting a treat to either collection, please read the notes below.

( Posting, and to Which Collection )

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Bonus!! Decoy questions/author questions

A few weeks ago, we made a post about the questions we send to recipients when authors need to clarify something about their recipients' preferences.

As a result of that poll, in a situation where an author has a fandom-specific question, we will now send questions for at least 3 fandoms in a person's requests, but will not generally make up extra/decoy questions for their full set of fandoms.

You suggested that curious authors could make up (some of) their own extra questions. While that could be helpful - if you want to - we ask you to keep the following things in mind.

1. Clear questions are the best questions. Several times in the past we've received extremely confusing questions and it turned out a participant thought they needed to disguise what they were asking from the mods. Please do not.


2. Avoid excessive detail, especially about plots you don't plan to write. Don't ask your recipient "Would you be interested in a story where they time-travel to meet five different generations of their ancestors, and also there are capybara zombies?" unless you are contemplating such a plot (and maybe not even then) - because you may make your recipient hopeful about something that won't arrive.


3. Avoid being disingenuous about things that are actually clear to you. Try to ask about points of reasonable ambiguity. If you ask your recipient things like "You said you don't want any mention of hospitals, but is it okay if a character has a headache?" you could stress them out by making them wonder if they need to re-write their DNWs, or by making them wonder if you have wildly misinterpreted other parts of their requests. Decoy questions require a little creativity… but not too much. Save most of your creativity for the actual writing.

And again - you are not obliged to provide decoy questions! If you need to ask your recipient something, all we need from you is: 1) what information you need, and 2) who you are. That's great! We can take care of the rest.

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Schedule, Rules, & Collection | Contact Mods | Participant DW | Participant LJ | Pinch Hits on DW | Discord | Tag set | Tag set app
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Assignments are out! You can find your assignment:

• at your assignments page: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YOUR-USERNAME-HERE/assignments


• at the sidebar of the collection


• in your email.

You must write for one of your recipient's requests, including all of the characters they specified in that request (but see below). It doesn't have to be the fandom you offered.

Some recipients have selected several characters, but given permission for writers not to include them all using the Additional Tags checkboxes (the ones that start "My gift must…"). These tags are recent and we're still experimenting with their use, so please check through mods if you're not completely sure what your recipient means. You always have the option of including all the characters your recipient selected.

Your assignment is due at 9pm UTC on December 17. Note that this is an earlier deadline for 2025 as compared to the last few years and may be one calendar day earlier in your timezone.

Please click on that link right now! The date and time it shows may surprise you. Better to be surprised now than at the deadline!

Our reveals are earlier this year as well.

No Peeking (Or Squeaking) Until December 24th!
This is a secret exchange. Please don’t announce or hint what your assignment is. Don't say what you offered. Don’t reveal to your recipient who you are or what you plan to write for them. In fact, please don’t contact your recipient at all! You can send questions through the mods at yuletideadmin@gmail.com.

I have questions!!
Right! Send us an email at yuletideadmin@gmail.com, or, if your question won't give away what you offered or who you're writing for, you're welcome to comment here. We get tonnes of questions at this time, so please bear with us - it may take us a few days to reply.

Based on our survey about author questions and some internal discussion, this year we plan to include a questions for a few fandoms each time we contact a recipient, but we won’t necessarily include decoy questions for every single fandom. This may give the recipient a clue as to which fandoms they’re more likely to receive but should preserve some of the suspense!

Please don't ask us to poke your recipient to update a locked or placeholder letter until at least October 29.

When you send us a question about your assignment, please include your assignment link, which looks like: https://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2025/assignments/#######

Some of your questions may be answered by our next post when we reveal all requests. Please keep an eye on our admin community!

Pinch hits and all requests
The first batch of pinch hits will go out in the next day. In the next following days, after those pinch hits are claimed, we will make all requests visible and open the Yuletide Madness collection.

Check out the pinch hit community, yuletide_pinch_hits, and sign up through Discord, a feed, or the Google groups mailing list to get immediate alerts for pinch hits. You don't have to be signed up to this year's round of Yuletide to claim a pinch hit.

The New Year's Resolutions 2025 collection is now closed.

Schedule, Rules, & Collection | Contact Mods | Participant DW | Participant LJ | Pinch Hits on DW | Discord | Tag set | Tag set app
Please either comment logged-in or sign a name. Unsigned anonymous comments will be left screened.