Q: I have my Christmas music in a folder. When I shuffle my songs, I do not want to hear the Christmas music year round. Can I hide a folder so it wont shuffle with the rest of my music?

Enable the Skip when Shuffling option for each of your Christmas tracks in iTunes.  To this, right->click on each track or tracks and select Get Info.  When this window appears, select the Options tab and place a tick mark next to Skip When Shuffling. Then synced the updated changes to your iPod.

B-rock

You can use a Smart Playlist.

Create a smart playlist (from the File menu), and name it something like "All Songs - No Hoilday" (or whatever you want).  Right (or Control) click it and select Edit Smart Playlist.

Check the checkbox for Match all of the following rules.  (Make sure you select all, not any).

     First rule: Kind - contains - "audio file" (without the quotes)

This rule basically puts everything that is not a video on the smart playlist.

Subsequent rules should exclude things you do not want.  So in your case, I would use

    Genre - is not - "Podcast" (This excludes podcasts, which would be included.)

    Genre - is not - "Holiday"

(Click the plus sign next to the first rule to add a new rule.)

For that "not holiday" rule to work, you need to change the genre of all of your Christmas songs to be the same.  It doesn't have to he Holiday; it can be Christmas or whatever you want it to be.  Just make the rule exclude every song with that genre name.

If you have placed all of your Christmas songs into one playlist, you should be able to use this rule instead

     Playlist - is not - <name of that playlist with Christmas songs>

You can add other rules to exclude songs.  For my shuffle, I also exclude the genres Classical and Soundtrack.

Check the checkbox for Live updating.  Click OK to save the changes.

Once you are happy with the smart playlist, set it as the Autofill folder.  The iPod will then select randomly from a list of all of your songs, minus the ones you want excluded.