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Ask HN: How are you spending your Christmas Day?

13 points by Jaruzel ↗ HN
Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays everyone. In the few years I've been frequenting HN I've come to feel very much part of this community, in a way that other online spaces have never been for me.

Due to personal circumstances, my partner and I won't be celebrating Christmas until early January. Which brings me to wonder...

How are you all spending your time today? Traditional or not, let us share our stories!

17 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 53.5 ms ] thread
mindcrime
Well, it's 7:26 AM here, and I haven't gone to bed from Christmas Eve yet. I was up all night working on our billing service, specifically adding the feature to generate PDF invoices and emailing them to customers. I have the skeleton of that in place now, but still need to finish the layout of the PDF, and wire up the code to populate it from the customer and invoice information on the backend.

So.. right now I'm taking a break, watching this video (Sam Altman interviewing Mark Zuckerberg) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb4IcGF5iTQ and then planning to sleep in a little while.

Once I wake up, I'll cook, and then spend the rest of the day fixing up that PDF business, and the email sending stuff.

Once that's done the next couple of items on the TODO list include wiring up the OAuth integration where this app makes calls to other backend services, and doing more work to make our SSO server production ready.

Also need to spin up a new VPS (probably at Hetzner) to deploy this app.

Not sure how much of that I'll get through today, but that's roughly what I'll be doing.

Doyniish
Wowzer, crack open a beer and enjoy Christmas! Work can wait. Merry Christmas!
mindcrime
But the work is what I enjoy. You think I'd do all this just to make money? :-)

That said, I will take a break and go have dinner with a buddy of mine. That's really my "Christmas celebration".

world32
I initially thought this post was a parody of a typical hacker news reading software engineer working on a startup. There are just so many cliches here it's almost cringe worthy. Reminds me of that homejoy post where the founder was bragging that half the company was working on Christmas Eve.
newman8r
I just finished 3d printing the last of the gifts on my list. Spending the day with my family, dinner at my grandparent's house. I'll probably only spend a couple of hours on my startup project today - I've got a bunch of demos scheduled for early January and a lot left to finish, so no days off.
FlopV
I'll be walking dogs at the humane society for a few hours with some friends. From there, we'll go to the beach for lunch and might do some free diving depending on the conditions of the water.

Tonight we'll have a bonfire and pot luck. My family is up in the northeast, I live down in the Caribbean.

This time last year, we didn't have electricity, so we have much to be thankful for looking back at 2018.

themanwhosold
Driving through Germany and France trying to find the open cafe or restaurant to find at least some food.
brador
Tip: Head to non-native areas (chinese, indian). They're less likely to be celebrating Christmas, and more likely to be open for business. We found an open supermarket and a awesome chinese buffet last year using this trick.
phakding
Good luck with that. My girlfriend works at a German airport and she told me that even the shops and cafes in the airport are closed.
jrnichols
I'm a paramedic, so I'm at work today. Fortunately it's not at my 911 job but at an urgent care, so the chances of it being a little less busy are much higher.

Even better, the nearby Starbucks still has my favorite holiday drinks.

We did all of our Christmas stuff at home last night.

trcollinson
Thank you for what you do. Luckily (fingers crossed) I haven’t needed an Urgent Care on Christmas Day for the last few years. But I did slice open a finger two years in a row (same finger, same stupid slicing accident, I’ve grown better with knife skills) and needed stitches ASAP. I am so grateful for the professionals in the medical field that serve us even with our own stupidity. Thank you and have a happy holidays!
jrnichols
Slicing accident?

it might not come as a surprise to hear that a lot of the lacerations/etc we see are related to opening mail/packages/Amazon stuff. ;-)

trcollinson
I was actually preparing a standing prime rib roast! And trimming the fat. I held the roast with one hand and slices towards that hand with the other. Twice! The first year, shame on the roast. But the second year... lol
FlyMoreRockets
Retired from EMS last year. The resulting calmness and serenity is sublime. Keep on keeping on, brother.

This Christmas, I'm not doing much at all and it's really nice.

koksik202
visiting familiy and playing video games in the evening :) nothing better than people not celebrating Christmas covering the oncall.
JoshCalbet
Learning about how a friend of a college has a sibling who work in Korea, and surprisingly noticing that they complained how people there "lives to work".
miguelrochefort
I'm traveling in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

A pickpocket stole my phone on Christmas Eve at the mark of midnight.

I spent Christmas day looking for a replacement device and trying to set it up. I later ate some convenience store ramen, called my parents, and went to sleep.