December in Photos: Building the Holiday Recap You'll Actually Watch on New Year's Eve

December is the most-photographed month of the year for most families, and also the month people least enjoy reviewing their photos. The camera roll is a chaos of tree-trimming close-ups, half-eaten cookie arrangements, and forty nearly-identical photos of the dog refusing to wear the reindeer antlers.

A PhotoCast video is the easiest way to compress all of it into something the family actually watches. The trick is to lean into the chaos rather than fight it. December isn't a neat narrative; it's thirty-one days of small, overlapping memories, and the narration should sound that way.

What people have found works:

• Use the Playful or Documentary style for December, and pick the music to match—something calm for the quiet nights, something livelier for the parties. The month has too many tonal shifts for a single register.
• Include the fails. The lopsided gingerbread house, the candle that set off the smoke alarm, the ornament the cat broke. December's real memories live in the small disasters.
• Add a one-line closing note: "This is December. We'll do it again next year." That's the entire point of the video, said once at the end.