Ban on overly Xmassy sites.

I love Christmas. Or most bits of it. I like the red bits, and the bits with the lights, and I especially like the bits where it gets cold and dark and then I get presents. And I don’t even mind the commercialization of Xmas; shops fronts all dressed up, corny music playing everywhere, people I don’t recall sending me cards and making me feel guilty so I send them a card next year when they forget to send me one because I was too late this year, and so on. All that is part of the fun. It’s what Xmas is all about. And I still think Coca Cola deserves at least half a nobel peace prize for coming up with Santa and all the wooly-redness that he brings with him. Maybe we can find a used nobel prize on eBay or something. Paint it a little. Put it in the mail. Come on, it’s the least we can do!

But where it all starts to break down for me is all the website updates. Suddenly every single site in existence needs to update their graphics to make them all… well… Xmassy. Adding lights and reindeer and, for the love of Coke, snow. Snow, snow, snow! Please! It was bad enough when Google started updating their logo for every single calendar item (apart from “Saint Pascal’s Afternoon” I don’t think they skipped a single one). Do we all have to follow? Do we all have to keep pretending that websites are somehow real places and thus in need of festive make-overs? No, we do not.

So you can imagine my intense dismay when, after a dreary afternoon of zoning out and killing time, I noticed that I’d not only doodled some Xmassy graphics for my website, I’d also compressed the files, uploaded them, changed the site’s html, and made the whole thing go live. I mean, really, of all absentminded mistakes to make!

Needless to say I was embarrassed to find I’d sunk so much time into it. So much so I decided to invest no further time into it at all, such as the time needed to revert everything back again. I’ll get to it some time, perhaps in the new year…