It’s NOT Christmas Yet…
Something is bothering me this Christmas season. It’s that it’s not yet the Christmas season. It’s the Thanksgiving season!!!!!!
With all the diversity of my workplace and neighborhood, I’ve had to learn to call the entire stretch from late October to the New Years’ day the ‘holiday’ season. That’s ok, because I know what I celebrate and I wouldn’t think of saying happy birthday to someone because it’s my birthday. So, in the same way it feels a bit odd to say Merry Christmas to my Jewish friends, just as it would be odd for them to say Happy Hanukkah to me. So, for this post, MY holiday example will not be Festivas, the secular holiday where individuals air their grievances from the past year. My example will be Christmas.
What’s really bothering me is that our culture seems to be blatantly jumping to the Christmas season and completely ignoring Thanksgiving. It may be that the economy is down and all the retailers know that very few people sit around the turkey opening their Thanksgiving gifts (that will be next year’s consumerism ploy).
So, everyone is jumping to Christmas. I don’t like it. Just as I think it’s wrong to discuss your next vacation while you’re still on the current vacation, or discuss your next meal while eating your current meal, we shouldn’t be playing up Christmas when we haven’t yet celebrated the next holiday, Thanksgiving. I also think it’s a bit of a reflection of our culture. We’re less inclined to be thankful, grateful for what we have. We can’t wait to get more stuff. We don’t want to reflect on how our country was formed. We’d rather get stuff.
This weekend, I ran to the grocery store to pick up a few things. While walking through the green, yellow and orange peppers in the produce section at HEB, I heard “Santa Claus is coming to town.” (Hope that song doesn’t stick in your mind now.) I have to tell you, while I liked the upbeat nature of the music and perhaps it tempted me into spending more than usual, its not right. Tonight, the kids and I watched an episode of Good Eats before reading time and some of the advertisements (which I normally mute) had snowflakes and sleigh bells ringing. Everyone knows that imagery has nothing to do with turkeys, stuffing or the Dallas Cowboys versus the Washington Redskins! I actually yelled at the television. I’ve become one of those dads.
And today at work, I went to Google’s homepage to search for something and “Google” has Christmas lights hanging from the G to the E. Is this really true?
My, what is this world coming to. We’re living in a new neighborhood this year and you can be sure I’ll be keeping a close eye on my neighbors and noting who puts up Christmas lights first.
What about you? Have you seen Christmas come earlier this year that in year’s past? Have you seen anyone advertising pre-Christmas specials? Anyone driving around with Christmas wreaths on their cars? Any Santa hats at the office yet?
I Love My Coffee
On Monday of this week I stopped drinking coffee. It was at the prompting of a Twitter contact,
@davidberlind, and I said I would do it for five days, see how I felt, if I slept any better (couldn’t really get any better), if I had withdrawals symptoms and then would re-evaluate if I continued. (Pause, while I take a long drink of my rich cup of coffee with just a bit of half-and-half).
Ok, I’m back. Late last week, I commented on Twitter that I was enjoying my first cup of coffee for the day, it was a beautiful cool morning in Austin and I was looking forward to the day. (Another drink, be right back.) Well, David, someone I used to work with pretty regularly when I was in my company’s product communications team, said he no longer drank coffee, he sleeps much better, and now drinks nothing but green herbal, caffeine-free tea. (Sorry, one more drink.)
Well, after a few back and forth tweets with him, I thought perhaps it would be a good idea to see how my body would react to five days without the dark, flavorful, creamy stuff, hold on, I have to have another drink.
The reaction from my followers on Twitter was very funny. Most people said, no, don’t do it. You’ll have headaches, you won’t like it, and suggested I would be unbearable to be around. These claims were not my experience. Yes, I did have moments where I felt an incredible sereneness, not really tired but more of incredible calm to my demeanor. I never got headaches and actually my sleeping got worse but that may been tied to my back being sore for some reason. (Last drink, I promise.)
So, this morning, I awoke at 5:30am, no alarm, ready to go to the kitchen, make a pot of coffee, open up the Bible for a long-overdue quiet time, and begin my day. Upon reflection on the past five days, here are my top reasons why I love coffee.
Why I Will Not Break Up With Mr. Mrs. Coffee Again
- He She looks so good in my cup, even better than on the coffee commercials on TV (Don’t they make coffee look like it will solve all your problems?)
- He She is an integral part of the grown-up culture (coffee-break; hey, let’s grab a cup of coffee; my third place; I need my car to have those spills just like in my parent’s Buick Roadmaster, and the Lincoln Towncar before that.)
- The contrast of him her against my white coffee cup is very artsy.
- We have a kitchen full of accessories to accompany our coffee lifestyle (a coffee maker, a coffee grinder, an espresso machine, cream and sugar dispensers, coffee cups, travel cups, re-usable coffee filters, on and on and on.)
- My grandfather, Erick, was the first person to teach me how to drink coffee when I was just little, with lots of cream and sugar and a day-old Swedish roll dunked in it. I would be turning my back on my culture if I ever stop drinking my friend again.
I have to go. My wife is now up with her cup of coffee and my cup is empty. What do you like about coffee?
Making Pizza Dough
Though I don’t give you the actual recipe, my wife taped a portion of me making my sister’s pizza dough for some friends recently. If you’d like the recipe, drop me a note.
Click here to watch the HD video using the Kodak Zi6 tiny little video camera. Don’t mind the acting.
Portable Hard Drives
Saw this video (courtesy of Dave Farmer on Facebook) from Popular Mechanics on the ruggedness of portable hard drives. No implied endorsement here, simply showing you the video. I may have to get one of these.
I Am a Digital Nomad, Really?
Today, we launched Digitalnomads.com, in conjunction with the launch of new Latitude commercial laptops and Dell Precision mobile workstations. As part of the launch, I crafted a post on what the whole concept of ‘digital nomads’ meant.
As I wrote it, and as I viewed videos of people who had millions of frequent flyer miles, I thought about what it was that made me a digital nomad. What I decided was that perhaps my story of moving from a desk-based knowledge worker to one that was nomadic, moving from space to space with my laptop the center of my workspace, would resonate with an even larger percent of our readers than the guy who suggests you keep a blanket over your head while flying internationally. I’m not saying he’s not right, but would what he said really resonate with my peers? So, hopefully in the coming weeks and months, I’ll begin to write about the benefits of going completely mobile. What are the challenges? What are the benefits? How do I collaborate with my colleagues.
Stay tuned.
What Is a Blog, You Ask?
I’ve been fortunate that most of my family members understand exactly what I do in my job. In my current role, I look after all things digital to reach employees of the company I work for, which means I need to understand social tools like Facebook and Twitter. Over the past 18 months, we’ve rolled out nine different blogs to engage with and listen to employees so I thought I’d post a very simple YouTube video a colleague of mine on the external side showed me recently. It offers a simple explanation of how blogs have taken off and represent the democratization of content authoring. Take a look. (This video is courtesy of Lee and Sachi LeFever at www.commoncraft.com/show)
Someone sent me a link to a post by the folks at Duct Tape Marketing that said the following: “There was a great movie years ago called 









