The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : What Fun It Is to See Christmas on the Web
Whew! After a couple of days poking around online, I’m here to report that Christmas in cyberspace is almost as exhausting as Christmas in reality. This evening, as I sit down to write, I’m downright bleary.
I’ll also confess that, at first, I wasn’t as excited about Christmas online this year as last. Sure, you can e-mail Santa, and yes, you can send electronic greeting cards. The folks at alt.bitterness are still at it too; recent subjects include “don’t send Christmas cards,” “I park in the handicapped spaces,” “OK, it’s petty, but so what” and the inevitable ‘just answer me this.” A posting titled “presents” sums up the gift-giving ritual with typical alt.bitterness eloquence: “The whole gift deal is lame.” And yes, for the truly lugubrious, there’s still alt.suicide.holiday.
But we had all that last year. This year, as it turns out, the best place to experience Christmas online is the World Wide Web. After cruising the Web for Christmas for a while, I thought I understood how Santa Claus must feel. The world is so vast, so full of good children, how can he possibly visit them all? It’s more or less the same on the Internet, where Christmas-oriented sites abound in such numbers that I couldn’t possibly visit them all between now and Christmas.
Let me just cite one of my favorites as an example of Christmas serendipity in cyberspace. It’s Tom Brinck’s page at https://www.crew.umich.edu/~brinck/poetry/xmas-haiku.html. Brinck is a graduate student in psychology at the University of Michigan, but instead of whining in alt.angst, he has put his computer to good use by producing some delightful Christmas haiku, such as:
popcorn on a string.
the dog licks off the salt.
church bells in the distance.
For a more general way into Christmas on the Internet, try https://www.santaclaus.com, which offers an array of Christmas-related links, including Christmas stories from O. Henry and Charles Dickens, Christmas cartoons, Christmas humor, information on Christmas movies and the obligatory Santa e-mail.
Another excellent Christmas gateway is at https://www.claus.com, with especially nice, fast graphics, as well as recipes and more. Several sites claim to be at the North Pole, including one representing itself as Santa’s Home Page, at https://www.north-pole.com. I stopped to message Santa here, and was asked to name my first and second choices for preferred presents. Among my two top requests--more RAM and more talent--it seemed obvious which was more important. I mean, just think what I could do with 16 megabytes.
Then there is https://www.america.net; choose Santa’s Holiday Bookmarks for a home page full of Christmas cheer in the form of links to “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” by Dr. Seuss, a variety of holiday recipes (including a place to add your favorites), the famous 1897 editorial from the New York Sun reassuring a child about Santa (‘Yes, Virginia,” etc.), and a great deal more.
Other Web sites worth visiting before Christmas include https://north.pole.org, https://ottawa.net/santa.html, and https://www.christmas.com. At christmas.com, they have a counter that will tell you how many seconds until Christmas, and lyrics to many Christmas carols of the kind whose melodies are vastly more familiar than their words.
Needless to say, there are many, many more Christmas pages on the World Wide Web, but any of the above should lead you to the others.
The Big Three online services also offer a good deal of Christmas fare. This Christmas, America Online continues to show why it excels as an online service catering to families. Its holiday Web site, accessible even to nonsubscribers at https://www.aol.com/holidays, is a fine place for a Christmas visit, but AOL subscribers can also use the keyword CHRISTMAS to access a wealth of additional material, much of it aimed at children.
You can download drawings of snowmen, for instance, use any old graphics program (such as Windows Paintbrush) to fill them in and customize them any way you wish, and upload them again for everyone else on AOL to see.
Among the many creative notions here is a discussion between kids and old people about holiday traditions, which I found through the Blackberry Creek Holiday Traditions selection. I must confess that I find children more charming in person, or perhaps even in theory, than I do online, but some of the elderly respondents had interesting things to say. One recalled the days when people used real candles on Christmas trees (and the hazards thereof), and another recalled Christmas and Boxing Day in England years ago, describing “the Christmas cake with a marzipan layer and the lucky sixpence wrapped up among the currants and raisins. The tangerine in the bottom of the stocking and the gold-foil-covered chocolate pennies.”
Also under Holiday Traditions, there is a brief but charming Christmas memoir entitled “Old Kentucky Christmas.” And you can use the keyword IMPROV to find and download a satirical holiday song entitled “Christmas in L.A.”
On CompuServe, GOHOLIDAYS brings you a menu from which you can choose ‘holiday central.” Here you’ll gain access to CompuServe’s many Christmas offerings, including a selection of electronic holiday greeting cards, Christmas recipes, Christmas-oriented screen savers and other software and, of course, the chance to have your pets write a Christmas letter to Santa. Santa makes various forum appearances as well.
On Prodigy, use the jumpword CHRISTMAS to access all the service’s holiday offerings, such as they are. My favorite is the section on worldwide holiday legends. The prose is so simple it’s almost simple-minded, but it’s nice to be able to learn what people in Italy, Japan, Russia and other countries do this time of year. Prodigy also lets you send greeting cards to other users, and offers an illustrated version of Clement Clarke Moore’s classic “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” which is also available on the Internet.
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BTW: I may have jeopardized my place in the afterlife last week by giving incomplete instructions for subscribing to the “Ask the Rabbi” Internet mailing list, so let me set the record straight. To subscribe, e-mail the command SUB ask Augie March to listproc@jer1.co.il. If you’re not Augie March, use your own name instead.
Daniel Akst welcomes messages at Dan.Akst@latimes.com. His World Wide Web page is at https://www.caprica.com/~akst
