We’re getting festive in BMJ Towers, mince pies, tinsel, and dubious jumper choices abound. So settle back and let the Christmas issue relax you like a postprandial sherry.

What makes a good playlist? This is a much more complicated question than I had first suspected, and some strong opinions were expressed by colleagues. (Most militantly by Navjoyt Ladher, our clinical reviews editor, who is a strict adherent of High Fidelity protagonist Rob Gordon’s method: “The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules.”)

David Bosanquet, and his surgical colleagues from Cardiff have editorialised the evidence of medical music, and serial Christmas author Rob Stepney and his son Nick have examined the portrayal of doctors in the charts.

So what makes the perfect surgical playlist? Do orthopods prefer soft rock, are neurosurgeons all listening to Robert Glass? We want you to share your crafted listening experiences with us in a rapid response to Bosanquet’s Editorial, and we’ll collate them on bmj.com/playlists (you can follow us on Spotify now too—the-bmj).

GPs, as your lists grow as patients make appointments before the festive period kicks off, have a think about how your colleagues at Westgate Health Centre in Dundee have done—they explain how their “guarantee to be seen” promise has been implemented and has become a raging success with patients and practitioners alike in our Christmas Feature, The King Canute GP appointment system.

Duncan Jarvies is multimedia producer for The BMJ.