I'll be home for Christmas.

You can plan on me.

Please have snow,

And mistletoe,

And presents on the tree.

(So) Christmas Eve will find me,

Where the love light gleams.

I'll be home for Christmas,

If only in my dreams.

Thank you for taking the time out of your busy holidays to visit my 1997 Christmas Page. While I could not legally secure a sound track to this page, I recommend you listen to the Elvis Presley recording of I'll Be Home For Christmas.  Check at the bottom of this page for links to pages with this song in several different formats.

Here is the full story of the origins of this page. Fairly late in 1993 I decided to design an animated video of the Elvis recording of I'll Be Home For Christmas. All the images I used would be animated on my old Apple IIgs. An Apple IIgs was the 16 bit computer Apple built in the popular Apple II line. An Apple IIgs could output color composite video straight into a VCR. I then set about designing in my mind the frames to the video. The hardest frame was the one containing the church. Since I cannot draw people well, I placed a church in the frame to introduce an overt religious feel to the video. Then using drawing/animation software, I generated the eight frames to the video. The last frame was created by simply moving a double long picture slowly down, then showing a still frame of my credit. There was also a minute long credit sequence designed using different software. Each frame was 320 pixels by 200 pixels which just so happens to have been one of the normal resolutions on an Apple IIgs. On December 10, 1993, the computer material was recorded onto VHS video tape. Then the whole product was dubbed onto a second video tape with a CD copy of the song onto HiFi VHS video tape. Even today I make dubs off of this second tape.

I made one more video of this type the next year which is represented at my Santa Claus Blues page. At my church, our theme for the 1996 Advent Season was "Home For Christmas" and my video was shown before the early service for four Sundays.

Fast forward to 1997 when I located the original images on an old 800K floppy disk formatted Apple PRODOS. I converted the images to the GIF format, connected my old computer to a 486 running Windows, and with terminal emulation programs, copied the series of images. Now the images could be read by most modern paint programs. Using Microsoft's GIF Animator, I generated the new animations with different timings. I left the size alone, so the frames are the original 320 x 200 size. For the eighth frame, I made separate images of the double long image moving downward and tacked on the last frame with my credit. Unfortunately, I had the settings wrong in the animation program, which made the pictures grainy.  So this year I reanimated the whole song from the original images and made the last frame smaller in size for better downloading.  Now I can share the experience with anyone. I still say the video experience is the best, but if you cannot catch the video this year, this web page is the next best thing.  By the way, this page plus it's predecessor has been visited times so far since 11/25/1997.

Of course I suggest you get a CD copy of Elvis singing the song which can be found everywhere.  Return to the Chris Augustus Christmas Central Page.  Have a merry Christmas!