Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual holiday characterized chiefly as a time for getting together with one’s family, spreading goodwill, feasting, and exchanging presents - Wikipedia definition.
That’s as good a definition of modern Christmas as any I’ve seen, and it accurately reflects how my family spent Christmas Day - lots of goodwill, plenty of feasting and exchanging cool gifts. We had three generations of us in our little cottage: seven of us for lunch in total. Our cottage is, let’s say, compact, so we had quite a full house.
Laura, my wife, did a magnificent job with the turkey, all 8.8 kilos (20lbs) of it. Far too much for one lunch (clearly we over-calculated the size we needed when we ordered it online a few weeks ago) so plenty to share for more lunches for the rest of this week. We’ll be sick of turkey soon!
A lot of thought went into gifts. I think everyone was pleased with their exchanges - both the giving and the receiving - judging from everyone’s genuine reactions.
I know I was, especially with two gifts I received - Star Wars Episodes 4-6 Limited Edition DVDs which contain the original theatrical releases as well as the digitally remastered movies; and Second Life: The Official Guide, the first book I’ve seen that explains how this virtual world works. Definitely an FIR book review on that coming soon.
My favourite, though, is a t-shirt from my daughter sporting the slogan “No, I will not fix your computer.” Family members take note for 2007 although - nudge, nudge - bribes will probably work as they always have 
I’ve just uploaded some photos to Flickr including some shots that really do illustrate to me the consumer focus of Christmas.
This year was the first Christmas I can remember where I was almost completely offline for 72 hours - Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and yesterday Boxing Day. Which was just perfect, in fact.
Catching up this morning with RSS feeds in particular, a number of new podcasts have arrived and are queued up for listening including the Queen’s Christmas Day message to the nation, and Mitch Joel’s internationally-flavoured Six Pixels of Separation to which I contributed. You could hardly imagine two podcasts that are in such contrast with each other.
Shel’s also posted two new podcasts to our FIR site which will be cross-posted here soon. And speaking of FIR, Lee Hopkins has penned quite a makes-me-blush eulogy to FIR (reaction to it in the next FIR tomorrow).
Scanning the conversations in this blog, I see some more interesting views expressed in my most recent post about Second Life. That’s quite an interesting conversation which I need to add to.
But I’m taking things relatively quietly this week. Very light blogging as I have some work commitments which will occupy most of my attention. I also plan to make some changes to this blog if I can get some time before the New Year.
I hope you’re having a great Christmas as well.
