Friends

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.

Sign-ups for this year's event are now closed, with 1224 sign-ups. Welcome to everyone who's joined us for Yuletide 2025!

The Avoid Matching request form will remain open for another three hours for last-minute edits to your requests.

What will mods do now?
- Run matching.
- Contact participants who have no possible recipients, or where there's another matter to discuss.
- Update you on when assignments are likely to go out.

If we need to contact you, we'll use the email account associated with your AO3 account. (You can find it at Preferences -> Edit Profile -> Change Email.) We may also use this account later in Yuletide - for example, if your author has a question for you. Please check that you can access this email!

What should you do now?

• Check and edit any letter you may have linked in your sign-up (please ensure it's complete by end of October 29th AT THE VERY LATEST, and consider adding it to the app and to the comments at the letters post). (If you didn't link your letter in your sign-up, it's too late now. Trust in your author!)


• Please check your letter is accessible - log out of the platform where you have posted it and check that you can still view it, or ask a friend to. Tumblr in particular may cause issues with this and may require you to change your settings.


• Keep quiet about what you've offered: Yuletide is anonymous until reveals.


• Check that you can access your AO3-linked email.


• 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.


• Browse the promo post or even add a promotion.


• Check that you're happy with your AO3 settings for treats / unassigned gifts - see an older post for more information. If your account is new, treats may be disabled.


• Look forward to your assignments!

Congratulations to everyone who posted a story to the 2025 New Year's Resolutions collection, either as requested by mods or just because you wanted to fill a prompt. The collection will be open for roughly one more day, until we send out assignments - if you're planning to post, post soon! The NYR 2026 collection will open on January 1.

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.

Sign-up instructions
Collection
Letters post

Countdown to Sign-Ups Closing

Some notes/reminders:

• If you don't select characters in a request, it's your author's choice which character or characters to include from the tag set. Please don't say you want a particular character more than others when you have not selected character tags.


• Please check the additional tag you've selected makes sense for the characters you've selected. For example, "One or more characters (giver's choice)" doesn't make sense if you select several characters and you really want at least two to interact.


• Please check you can access the email associated with your AO3 account. Mods may use this to reach out to you with questions.


• If you are open to treats, feel free to say so - it isn't greedy! It's just letting people know that you haven't disabled the treat setting.

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.

Sign-ups close at 9pm UTC 24 October. We're more than halfway through sign-ups - if you haven't signed up, get in quick! If you have signed up, we're glad to have you. Please check all your details are correct.

If your sign-up includes a letter link, please make sure that link works for all viewers! In particular, if your letter is on tumblr, please set it up to be viewable for people who do NOT have tumblr. If you're using Google docs, we recommend linking a web-published version of your letter.

Pinch hits

Pinch hits are a major part of Yuletide. Pinch hits are writing assignments that need to be claimed by volunteers, and pinch hitters are the writers who claim and fulfil them. Currently, we publish pinch hit details on yuletide_pinch_hits, but we also send out notifications of new pinch hits to members of the Yuletide Discord server who have taken on the "yulephs" role, and to anyone subscribed to the Google Group for Yuletide pinch hits.

If you're interested in helping out by taking on extra assignments, please check that you're signed up to receive notifications by one of these methods! We'll send a test message out soon.

Sign-ups

We've introduced some new features this year! You can now request up to 8 fandoms, and you may fill out a form (linked from the sign-up form) if there are people you would prefer not to match to. Beginning in 2023 we have also included an additional tag checkbox where you can specify whether you want all of your requested characters to appear, or if you’d be happy with particular combinations you specify, or any combination your writer chooses.

If you have questions about any of these, please email us at yuletideadmin@gmail.com! We'd like to make sure things go smoothly for you.

Requesting characters can be a tricky aspect of Yuletide, so just in case, here's a refresher:

If you select 2-4 characters in a request, you can only match to someone who offers them all, even if you’ve indicated in the additional tags that you’re happy with any one of them. If there are 4 or fewer characters nominated, and you’d be happy with a story about any of them, selecting no characters gives you the widest range of matches.

If you select no characters in a request, that means your writer may write about any nominated character or about the fandom world in general. Please only do this when you'd genuinely be happy with a story about any nominated character, or the world.

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.