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.