Mission Happy Holidays: Return and Report

So now the months of work is finished. It's over, but now it's time to report the outcome of what I witnessed. The project was introduced into the public slowly beginning the first part of November and increased so that the rest of the photo animations were being introduced daily up until a few days before Christmas. There were three places I shared them on social media: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. So the question is, did it work? Did I help brighten the holiday for the people who were struggling with it this year? The truth is, I can't entirely answer that, but evidence that I've seen from my social media responses seem to point toward the affirmative.

• Facebook: I shared my things in two places. One was on my own personal timeline. There was some response there that was supportive, but I have to say here that I've got some awesome family and friends who are supportive in these crazy things I come up with. The other place I shared them were in a Disney group, because a lot of my animations were animations from some Disneyland photos I took during the holidays in 2019. I had a few that weren't noticed much, and one that for some reason the administrators deleted. That made me a little sad, because it was a favorite, but for the ones that were noticed I got a better response than expected, particularly the ones of the castle.
• Twitter: I debated whether or not to share on Twitter, because I normally don't get much response, probably because I don't have a lot of time for it, but honestly I got a surprisingly great response on Twitter also, excluding the weird guy trying to spread some crazy type of extreme Christian propaganda. Most of the videos got shares and likes, which is quite a significant amount of response for me. Most of my Tweets don't get much notice.
• YouTube: Ah, YouTube. I'd never really took it seriously, and I don't monetize my account, because I really don't produce enough attention or material to be worth getting paid. The account was actually inactive until earlier this year. Many of those were video shorts or nature photo slide shows...a bunch of random things. Well, the videos seemed to be getting a little bit of attention as they began to be posted, but then something weird happened. The algorithm somehow attached one of my older Disney videos to a quite popular gaming channel video as a suggested video. My Toontown Mickey fountain video is getting over a hundred views a day now. Merry Christmas to me, I guess. I watched the numbers in amazement each day, but yet there is a little bit of sadness that comes with that, because the video is overshadowing some of my other things that are at least the same quality. I'd like something else to have a little attention sometimes. The number of likes increased, which hints that someone might have been cheered up by it, despite the fact that it wasn't part of the project.

The only goal in doing all of this was to help make someone's bleak 2020 holiday a little brighter, and if that helped at least one person, then I've been successful. I know it was a struggle for many people. There was a friend I had on Facebook who outright admitted that she was struggling with feeling the holiday cheer this year. So many of the responses to that were in agreement. I was probably one of the few people in those responses who were still cheerful about it. I explained the things I enjoy about Christmas that I still did and also my "little" project to cheer people up. We went to school together and parted ways after graduating, so she only had memories on me then, but from what she said to me, I certainly hope that I've maintained at least some of that trait she complimented me with (being nice to people). I know some people I've met since then would consider that a weakness of mine, but well, that's one weakness I would prefer to have over some other weaknesses.

The Facebook response to my message I left with this friend.