When I was six my parents got me a 26" Schwinn single-speed bike. It was as tall as I was. I rode it until college, doing things that were heretofore unknown to science. IT WAS GREAT.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you too. One of my fondest memories was getting a tiny battery-powered train set when I was around 6. No idea why I liked it so much. We didn't have many toys growing up so you had to enjoy the heck out of the ones you did get. I remember when I opened it up the room was dark and we sat under the light of our fake Christmas tree with multicolored lights.
My kids have too much these days and wonder if they will ever experience something like that.
Came home from Christmas Eve shopping/sight seeing in Manhattan with my dad and baby sister to find that our mom had gone and gotten us a puppy! I’d never had a dog before. It remains one of the best and happiest memories of my life :)
Polar Bear! He was a Bichon Poodle mix and his tail hadn’t grown in yet so he looked exactly like one of the little polar bears from the Coca Cola commercials
Back when I was very young, with my family, cousins, all over at my grandparents place, having lots of fun.
Here in Australia, Christmas is in our summer, so we used to have watermelon seed wars where everyone runs around the house eating watermelon as fast as possible to build up a mouthful of seeds to use as 'ammo' to machine gun spit at everyone else.
three days before xmas in 2022, my partner of 6 years threatened to kill me because i was scared to travel through an ice storm to her mom's house. while she was downstairs getting her pocket knife, i texted her best friend for help and got her to call her and she talked her down. the ice storm prevented any travel for 2 days; we still made it to her moms for xmas, but i was gone mentally for the next year and a half.
broke up with her in may this year; this is my first xmas all alone. all my friends and family moved out of state years ago, and i spent all my vacation days and sick days studying for a coding interview that i had last week for my dream job. i bombed it, partly because of anxiety, partly because ive been procedural programming for 8 years and suck at OOP principles, and partly because the PTSD makes it tough to study/concentrate around xmas.
anyway, im drinking a bottle of mccallan, out here alone with my two cats, and its still a better xmas than the last two years. apologies for trauma dumping, just tipsy i guess.
oh and i did get the oracle java 8 associate cert last night, so i got that going for me, which is nice.
edit:
best xmas memory was playing KOTOR 1 when it came out, while eating a big tub of dansk sugar cookies. that dantooine music was lovely
I don't know if there's a way to ask with sensitivity, but I'm very interested to know why you stayed with her for 18 months after she threatened to kill you?
Sorry about the job, happens to the best of us. I think when it's the dream job you're that much more likely to bomb. I quit my dream job because it couldn't pay the bills and joined a place I thought I wouldn't last at, now in year 8 it turns out it was the dream job.
no worries, been asking myself that question too. my best guess is that i had disassociated because i couldnt bear the cognitive dissonance from accepting the fact that i was in an abusive relationship. before that incident, everything in that relationship had been going well - but looking back i see that i was slowly becoming more and more reliant on her for her network of friends and her family, which made breaking up a difficult thought to consider. anyway, the other thing going on was sleep deprivation from a severely deviated septum - i broke up with her in may 2024 after a couples counseling session, in which she a) tried to blame me for the stabbing incident, and b) admitted to kicking me awake every night over the previous 4 years when i snored.
anyway. got surgery to fix that apnea issue in july, and ive been getting back to my old self.
edit: the other jarring thing was just how successful i was at work. anyone that uses AWS lambda benefited from my projects in 2023/2024 - some of that stuff got L10 visibility inside AWS. i guess i spent all my mental energy at work, even though i was (and still am) fully remote/WFH. anyway it was tough to reconcile my failures in my personal life with my successes in work life - i was both a failure and a success.
Godspeed, stranger. Sometimes just taking the first steps can be the hardest part of taking care of yourself. Keep it up, and best of luck during the new year.
Yep the isolation lets us run completely untrusted workloads. "Us" is not my team, I am adjacent, so I am not fully across which buzzwords but it is pretty cool.
I had a relationship turn that way, too, and had the same reaction - it took way too long to recognize what had happened and to step back and realize what I had to do. I didn’t want to admit it was over, I didn’t want to admit I’d been wrong, and I didn’t want to let go of the future I’d been imagining. When I got out, I looked back and realized I’d basically played the exact script from every story you ever hear about that kind of relationship - you know, the story where you hear it and say “that was stupid, I’d have just…”, except it turns out I wouldn’t have just, because I didn’t.
All that’s a long way to say I’m sorry for what you went through, and if any of what I’ve said resonates, you’re not alone and I encourage you to forgive yourself.
Enjoy your Christmas. Being alone ain’t the worst thing in the world.
Fortunately, it ended ok. I healed for over a year before dating again, and dated someone for exactly a year to make sure it was good relationship. It still is. :D
Man that Christmas playing KOTOR was phenomenal. First game I remember beating and immediately restarting to see the other storylines. Christmas cookies for sure enhances the experience.
I have a similar experience with Mass Effect. Completed the trilogy just in time for Christmas. Just getting lost in another universe like that is amazing and it's becoming increasingly difficult as I get older. Really treasure these moments, they remind me of a carefree childhood. Never played KOTOR myself but I always read great things about it. Look forward to playing it one day.
Was just going to chime in with this. Goldeneye on n64 Xmas day, selection box and sticky controller. What I wouldn’t do to feel that innocent safety again.
I feel this. Can't tell you how many interviews I bombed because of anxiety. The worst one I had spent like 3 months interviewing with the company, passed all of their tests, etc. When it came time to meet the team, I just froze. I answered all of their questions correctly, but it was like I wasn't myself. I became extremely slow, stammering my words, and just blanking out. The CTO couldn't take it anymore and said "just stop talking. This isn't going to work". I quickly ended the call without saying anything and felt so defeated. What is wrong with me.
That was years ago. I'm much better now, mostly because I have the confidence in my skills, but it still comes up, especially when people are being aggressive during interviews.
If it was the Seattle ice storm you're talking about, WTF. I could barely walk 10 feet out to let my dog out for potty/poop, let alone driving a car through that. The entire city shut down for the day.
yep. she had a dually truck and got home from the barn at 5pm; the storm was set to hit at 5:30. she wanted to load up the gifts, luggage, cats in the truck, travel 2 hours to a ferry down the backroads, and gamble on beating the storm. when i said i was scared, she went ballistic. never seen anyone get that mad before; being stuck with her in that house for 2 days after that was the worst moment of my life (as homer simpson would say, worst moment of your life... so far!)
It's hard to comprehend how much mental trauma someone must have gone through to be so unstable and violent.
The range of human experiences is significant. Humans communicate using the same languages and same expressions but mentally, different people are wired very differently.
That resulted in a loud chuckle. My mind was perfectly prepared to not expect a punch line, and it smacked me over the head. Thanks for the Christmas gift of laughter.
I'm Jewish, so all my Christmas's growing up were kinda the same. Sleep in, have brunch, wander over to my neighbor's house around noon to see what kind of loot they got and help them play with their new toys. Sometimes we'd go out for Chinese food and a movie.
But my favorite was Christmas 1999. My girlfriend was out of town with her family and there was no reason to go home to mine, so I was alone (my roommates were with their families too). I decided to go to the movies in Emeryville.
I was going to see Galaxy Quest, Bicentennial Man, and Man on the Moon. The timing lined up perfectly to see all three. About 50 other people were there to do the same thing. When it was time to go in for the first movie, a staff member came out and told us that it would start about 30 minutes late. This would of course cause us to miss all the other movies.
About 30 people stepped forward at the same time and asked to speak to the manager. :). We explained to him that it would throw our whole schedule off. Since it was Christmas, he was kind enough to adjust the schedule so that we could all see all three movies.
Oh that explains it, I thought it was just when I came of age. I did become suspicious that perhaps it wasn’t just a personal bias when I noticed the same movies on lists made by very different age groups.
I graduated in 1995 in LA. Going to the movies was something most of us did every weekend. Just show up and get a ticket for the next thing you haven’t seen yet.
Many consider 1994 the best single year for movies ever.
I got really lucky that that was also my peak movie going year.
It was around this time, in a little city of about 15,000, in South Australia, when my mum received a gift and voucher from Blockbuster for being in the top ten for most movie rentals in one year.
This was a time when movies were on VHS tapes, and there was a bit before the start of the movie that said something like “have you seen every movie ever made?”[1]
And at the time it certainly felt like we had watch nearly everything that store and one other had over the previous five years.
Nobody even knows about Dark City which came out the same year. Because the freaking Matrix came out too. That's just how many good films there were that year. If Dark City came out today it would be lauded as most original thing in a decade.
And Dark City was delayed after it was finished, it should have come out before The Matrix.
I copy here my previous HN comment from June 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36415981
I watched Dark City years after watching The Matrix (on opening in the cinema) and I enjoyed it very much, have watched it multiple times over the years.
This is Mr. Hand [Richard O’Brien] talking in ”Memories of Shell Beach”:
> It was a very groovy movie, you see?
> I remember saying to Rufus Sewell [who played the protagonist], I said, you know, it actually, truthfully, it really doesn’t matter, does it, whether it’s a box-office success because we’re going to get paid as actors anyway, sorry Alex [Proyas] but this is true, we’re gonna get paid as actors anyway and isn’t it nice to be part of something which is groovy?
I refer to dark city all the time when creating AI agents, when Kiefer would inject them with particular memories when the city stood still. And Shell Beach pops into my mind when I take the train to the former grandios Coney Island.
Existenz was another unique underappreciated movie of that year and whose theme never got picked by any other movie. When Jude Law realizes that the Chinese food he is eating can be put together to assemble the gun my mind was blown.
Fun fact: 1999 was also 'peak public phone booths'. Ever since then, they've declined in number and now are almost impossible to find. Every year it gets harder to follow that damn rabbit...
huh, american beauty was 99. i always remember the "plastic bag caught in the wind" scene - when i was in middle school, years before i saw the movie, i was sitting on the sidelines during football practice and saw a plastic bag caught in the wind. it was hypnotizing, enrapturing - i dont know how long i watched, but that floating bag caught against the side of the school building was one of the most beautiful things ive ever seen.
It was peak music too. I really don't think things have got much better since 1999. If you watch/listen to something even from 1997 it seems dated. But 99? Could have been made yesterday.
I punched in 1972 and there were some fantastic movies that year (The Godfather, Deliverance, Cabaret, Solaris, Jeremiah Johnson, Aguirre - the Wrath of God, The Last House on the Left, Silent Running, The Heartbreak Kid, Fat City, etc.).
Also tried 1973 — same (The Day of the Jackal, Soylent Green, Westworld, The Wicker Man, Papillon, American Graffiti, The Sting, Serpico, Mean Streets, High Plains Drifter, Don't Look Now, Badlands, The Long Goodbye, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Three Musketeers, Fantastic Planet, etc.).
I think they simply made better movies decades ago.
Maybe if they stopped the endless reboots, remakes, sequels and derivatives. There’s still a good one every once in a while. Oh well, I know what movie I’m watching today… you’ll shoot your eye out, kid!
Welcome to Hollywood's two decades of superhero movies.... I'm sure historians will greedily watch many of the classics of this early part of the 21st Century.
It's Christmas, I shouldn't be so negative.
I think I'll indulge in Alastair Sims' version of "A Christmas Carol".
It’s the J.J. Abrams misery box storytelling that ruined most TV shows / movies for me. Turning lazy writing from a vice into a virtue. Many shows now feel like they’re actively and intentionally wasting my time, ironically curing me of my desire to watch TV/Movies freeing up time for better uses.
The other lazy writing is the lack of conflict resolution enabling a continuous source of needless conflict, making an entire show out of a situation that could have easily been resolved if there had been a single ‘adult’ in the room. This has the added problem of normalizing the extreme confrontational or evasive communication styles as opposed to productive engagements. I guess this is what happens when TV raises a generation and then that generation goes on to make their own TV shows, each cycle worse than the previous. As bad as ‘engagement’/‘rage bait’ YouTubers are now I shudder to imagine what the next generation would bring.
Hollywood has done reboots/remakes forever how many remakes of "a star is born" for example has had three remakes (1954, 1976, 2018) since its first version in 1937. There is nothing new.
Rudolph has an odd nose, and he gets chosen to lead all the other Reindeer! Kids love this song. You teach it to them when they are young and they'll never forget it!
I’m sure this is just a coincidence than but Rudolph sounds a like Adolf, or in today’s concept Russian Adolf. And word red doesn’t help, as red was favorite SSSR color. 0_o
I'm Muslim, so all my Christmas's school and college days were kinda the same, 1980s. I would have a real small tree xmass decorated at home and no one would blink about it, then wander over to my christian friends' neighborhood around noon to see what kind of cherry and wine they were serving.
This is that neighborhood now
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1031546789002116&set=pcb...
I'm Muslim too and I always find it interesting to see how various non-Christian theists observe Christmas. Obviously we don't "celebrate" but I personally don't see anything wrong with partaking in the secular parts of Christmas (and let's be real, in the west, it's pretty much all secular).
My parents felt otherwise when I was growing up, so my siblings and I weren't allowed to do anything Christmas related, but now my wife and I would do seasonal things like watch a live performance of Nutcracker or Pentatonix or TSO. And can't forget about watching the holiday classic movies like Elf and Die Hard!
I will argue that in the US Christmas is in part a secular holiday - given its sorta pagan origins that makes total sense to me. It's a solstice feast basically.
The pagan origins thing is a myth, btw—all the various bits which people point to as evidence still date back to a Christian-era Europe and cannot be traced back further. Christianity has been around for a very very long time and has had a lot of time to evolve its own traditions. :)
For example, Christmas trees date back no later than the middle ages:
No, I'm not. All of these are, to the extent we know about them at all (which in some cases we don't know much), entirely unlike any Christmas traditions we have today which are claimed to be pagan in origin.
How do you know Christmas simply didn't align itself to those holidays themselves, because after all, a year end winter feast is nothing new in history? Or that the traditions we have today may have at once been part of such syncreticization but then died out until the modern day? In other words we don't necessarily have to see such traditions today per se for Christmas to have absorbed them over its time.
We don't. But we also don't know that they were, and we don't have enough quality evidence in favor of that hypothesis to justify the confidence with which it is asserted.
In the absence of evidence about the timing being affected by other festivals and in the presence of much evidence that all the actual traditions are far more recent than pagan, I don't believe it's fair to claim Christmas has pagan origins. The absolute best we can do is say that its timing may have been influenced by other, pre-Christian celebrations.
I agree but I also would be interested to see any proof for the claims you're talking about with regards to Christmas not having any pagan roots, where are you finding this information or rather, where can I read more?
I linked one example—a video on Christmas trees from a religious studies scholar. They have similar content on the date of Christmas, and there are plenty of sources on each other tradition.
Here's another one on Saturnalia from the same scholar:
One small exception
Russian empire turned a figure from Pagan mythology into a St Claus like figure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ded_Moroz
But my understanding is that him handing out gifts didn't come from Pagan traditions and was a result of largely copying Santa Claus traits.
Later during Soviet times secularish Christmas traditions including Ded Moroz were moved to New Year's.
Correct, but that's because most of the traditions have always been somewhat secular in nature (with religious significance strapped on after the tradition was already going) and have only become more so, not because they were borrowed/appropriated/adapted from a pre-Christian source.
No, they don't. That's my point—all the bits that make up secular Christmas have Christian origins and have become secularized over time. For every tradition that is commonly cited as having pagan origins, we can trace it back until it becomes entirely unrecognizable and it's still all Christians all the way down.
As near as I can tell the myth of the pagan origins of Christmas has its roots in fundamentalist Christians who wanted to abolish things that aren't contained in the Bible. "Pagan" made a good rhetorical whip at the time, but it's since been taken as a serious approach to history by popular culture.
ChatGPT and Grok say Christmas either does or might have pagan origins, but not that it definitely does not have pagan origins (yes, I know "proving negatives"is very difficult†).
LLMs do very poorly at judging the truth of long-term myths. When something has been asserted confidently on the internet over a long enough period of time it becomes baked into the weights, regardless of truth.
I provided a source from a religious studies scholar on Christmas trees specifically (one of the most frequently-cited "pagan" traditions). If you can point me to something with similar provenance I'll read it, but I'm not going to waste time on LLM responses.
The fact that there's almost nothing that overlaps with Christmas besides the timing, and that the timing has other plausible explanations.
FWIW, I'm very open to the timing having been shifted to coincide with other festivals, but that's not what most people mean when they say Christmas has pagan origins. They're not saying that Christmas isn't actually the day Jesus was born (I'm totally on board with that idea), they're saying that X, Y, and Z aspects of the Christmas celebration were originally pagan and were adapted for Christianity. I have seen no compelling evidence in favor of that claim about any aspect of Christmas traditions, and I've seen plenty against.
I think Christmas is whatever one makes of it. Whether or not one believes it's a Christian holiday or Pagan holiday — celebrate/observe (or don't) how you like. My wife's family is Catholic and they believe it's a sacred holiday so they celebrate it religiously. Its origins aren't important to that effect. Many religious traditions can probably be traced to secular origins.
Personally for me, it's a good excuse to take time off work and hang out and feast with people who also have time off work. I personally think that (at least in the States) it's basically a Commercial Holiday, in that it just encourages over-consumption, consumerisation.
I spoke to a muslim who basically just "gave in" and started doing Christmas at home because the kids wanted it. With the tree and Xmas presents etc even.
Yeah that's probably more common than you might expect. My mom is a teacher at an Islamic school and some of her 1st graders would often say stuff like "we have a Christmas tree at home but my mom told me not to tell anyone," which might give you an idea of how Muslims view Christmas.
It's not something I personally want to do for my family, but I don't think any less of families that do that.
The Soviet Union cancelled Christmas then later took the secular parts of Christmas (New Year's tree,a Santa like figure Ded Moroz/Grandfather Frost was original some sort of pagan slavic mystical figure before somehow being molded into a very Santa Claus character) and moved it to New Year
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novy_God
Soviet style New Year's is still celebrated in a number of post Soviet countries including I believe to some extent in some of the Muslim ones. It's also celebrated by post Soviet Jews in Israel and to some extent the US. Although the recent full scale invasion on Ukraine might effect popularity due to it's Soviet association.
I'm largely of the "hell is other people" mindset around Christmas, from the overtly fascist elderly relatives to the incomprehensible demands of immediate family. I would love just one Christmas like that!
I think people tend to fascism as they age, the more they've done and seen and accumulated, the more conservative they get and the more their personal experience of the world must be maintained, protected.
Talk to them about their youth, when they were wild and rebellious. Find out what trouble they caused. Remind them, and it just might crack the encrusted exterior a little bit.
See, i believe this is generally trueish for the current moment, has it always been true though? For example, I've already passed the time in which my father _insisted_ I would become conservative and have very much not developed anything like the conservative values of modern America. Though, maybe it's just that conservatism has drastically changed since the 70s. For instance, i certainly have become less insistent on things like UBI and more realistic about single payer Healthcare, but i have not developed disdain for illegal immigrants, the desire to force birth, anti-gay marriage, anti-trans, etc. Were these perquisites to be conservative in the 70s? I'd say im fiscally slightly left, but socially i simply cannot understand the rights positions, it just sounds like hater shit to me
Are you conflating fascism with conservatism? Stalin was a socialist, a fascist and a conservative in the sense in which the 'c' word indicates 'maintenance of the status quo'. Certainly conservatives like to conserve & we hope that means saving that which is generally considered worth conserving though opinions differ when it comes to the details. Hitler was a national socialist and most definitely a fascist. Unregulated powerful elements in any society will always tend towards a degree of compulsion to maintain their status and we're not short of examples in the West.
'and the more their personal experience of the world must be maintained, protected.' is merely an assertion which you choose to believe. I'm sure examples can be found but also plenty of counter examples. You can't generalize.
I’m Jewish too. But I’ve always been around people who celebrate Christmas. I don’t bother lighting the Menorah for Hanukkah this year since I live alone. I got half a mind to go to the local temple and sit with strangers there but I don’t really feel like it. Treating myself to some McDonalds a la uber eats today. I never eat the stuff.
I hope that Christmas finds you in a wealth of joy and whatever you’re looking for that causes such comments. We are all fighting our own battles and this is my sincere hope that you win yours!
I mean I share the sentiment against low quality food and its effect on health, as probably everybody who eats there is also probably aware of too, but again, this is not the time or the place...
Chinese restaurants are often owned by first or second generation Chinese immigrants who (1) aren't Christian and (2) haven't been in the US long enough to adopt local customs. Since restaurants often are marginally profitable, they tend to stay open on Christmas because there is profit to be made, especially since most of the competition is closed that day.
If you are Jewish, Christmas obviously isn't nearly as important to your (often nominally) Christian neighbors and there isn't much to do on Christmas day. If you decide you don't want to cook, Chinese restaurants are way over-represented in the choice of open restaurants. Once you do that for a couple years it becomes its own tradition.
I grew up in a Catholic household but my family, after years of making Turkey and spending hours cooking, for the past few years has switched to Chinese food on Christmas. I don't miss the turkey and gravy.
Chinese restaurants will also often have whole roast duck which is an easy way to get the dinner centerpiece if you’re cooking the rest. My family doesn’t eat out but we always get a whole duck on Christmas and Thanksgiving (it’s a 20 year old tradition at this point).
Others have mentioned that it's because Chinese places are open, but another reason is that Chinese food is (or was) not obviously treif, meaning that there is (or was) a degree of plausible deniability around eating it.
I was not aware that the error bars between kashrut and marit ayin are that wide. I figured that it was because of the intersection of Jewish middle class culture and Chinese culture starting in the 1930s, and because Chinese restaurants generally do not serve dairy products.
This is all apocrypha, so take it with a grain of salt. But my understanding is that this would be a case where marit ayin would not be a significant concern, since the Chinese dishes in question were not visually identifiable as e.g. pork.
Or another framing: if you were a semi-secular family (like mine) that tried to keep a semi-kosher home, it would be easier to eat a dish that contained finely minced pork or shellfish or similar. American Chinese food fits those parameters while also being available on Christmas, etc.
There's also a lot of vegetarian/non-pork-but-fleishig Chinese food. But the point was more that Chinese food that isn't kosher isn't obviously so, especially 60-70 years ago when it was less commonplace.
My Christmas Eve tradition with my wife for the last 14 years has been to eat as much Chinese food as we possibly can at our favorite Chinese place. Then we drive around town looking at Christmas lights while listening to classic Christmas music. Neither of us are religious, but we were both raised Christian.
I came into this thread thinking that I don't really have any great Christmas memories. My family was poor growing up, my parents shouldn't have been together for as long as they tried to make it work, and my father had a lot of issues with drugs and alcohol. But now that I think about it, these Christmas Eve memories with my wife are my favorite.
This is the top comment I hope for on every Christmas. Some of us draw snowmen instead of Santas. We all get a day to enjoy in our own way though. Sounds like a great time.
I’ve spent a lot of holidays alone over the last few years, and the HN community was a joy and a comfort every time.
I have the pleasure of spending holidays with family this year, and I’m trying to answer everyone’s questions about computer stuff, I invariably wind up referring to the great comments on HN as the best resource around.
I look forward to spending another year with all of you, and hope you all have a wonderful holiday.
Hope everyone was able to slow down the pace a little, connect a little more with people we may have not caught up with recently and send/receive positive vibes. And happy new year.
Some of my favorite memories are the times I got video game systems. Most notibly the Sega Genesis and z scale trains I got in '94/'95/'96 (not sure the exact year, I was very young) and GameBoy Color in '99. I got a Xbox in '01, Xbox 360 in '05; but they didn't quite have the same "magic" that they had when I was young. Also as a young kid, watching the Rankin Bass stop motion movies on the days leading up to Christmas. Then talking with my brother and sister while we tried (failed) to sleep on Christmas Eve, watching more and more obscure Christmas cartoons and whatever else would come on TV late on Christmas Eve night/Christmas morning.
The best non-Christmas morning memories were just random times I was at family Christmas parties or gatherings. Seeing aunts, uncles, and cousins dancing talking having fun. As a kid, we used to have the parties at family homes, which was always fun and super memorable. Later we moved to a hall as the family got bigger and cousins started to bring their children, in laws, and friends. I can't really point out any particular memory as good; just all the time spent with family, not necessarily caring about what else was going on in the world at the time.
There were quite a few I'll never remember the name of, but there were a lot of different renditions of A Christmas Carol with unknown characters on Cartoon Network or some other kids channel. I definitely remember Christmas Comes to Pac-Land[1], 'Twas the Night Before Christmas[2], A Jetson Christmas Carol[3], and one of the Flitstone Christmas episodes where they were acting in a play.
My grandmother broke the Christmas gift rules with my parents and got my brother and I a NES, Tetris, duck hunt with the gun, and I believe the Olympics with the power mat. Christmas windfall I’ll never forget, seeing my parents faces drop as we opened all those games and just ignored every other present. Grandma had a nack for tweaking my mom any way she could, one of the meanest people I’ve ever met in my life but this year our interests aligned.
My mom was enthralled by Tetris, better at the game than anyone in the house by a good 10 levels, and basically impossible to depose from the controller. I think it softened the blow with Grandma.
I remember being given a large K'nex construction set as a toy at Christmas. I can still feel the visceral excitement of opening it up and looking at all the pieces, imagine what kind of things I'd build. I think the ferris wheel was my favorite.
A few years ago I was a bit down abd feeling like I'd never experience that kind of excitement and joy again. I've come to realize that now I'm older it's my job to create that same joy in others.
I hope everyone is having a wonderful day and can find a way to create just a little moment of joy for someone else. Merry Christmas!
When I was in Oxford, almost all the students went home for Christmas -- for the domestic students it was easy to travel, and most of the international students were wealthy enough that the cost didn't matter to them. I came from a middle class background and flying back to Canada would have been a significant cost (especially since my scholarship came with a living allowance which was only paid while I was in the UK) so I stayed in Oxford.
My third year in college, we had a new Warden (head of college) and while he, like all the other academic staff, generally vacated the college over Christmas, he felt obliged to offer Christmas hospitality.
So he sent out an email to the entire student population: "Any students in college over Christmas are welcome to come to the Warden's Lodge for afternoon tea at 3pm on Christmas Day." -- and as I was the only student in college over the vacation, I had a lovely afternoon talking to the Warden and his wife.
Graduate students generally don't have much interaction with college academic life -- undergrads usually meet with the Warden every term, but grad students are left to the academic departments to supervise -- so it was a rare and precious opportunity.
I’ll skip the well-meaning attempt at personal engagement (too old and cranky for that) and just wish everyone Merry Christmas (or whatever religious/winter solstice variants span your spiritual function space at this time of year) and the happiest of New Years.
Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates it, if you're playing Santa for little ones I hope it was a success ;)
To everyone else, I hope you have a nice festive break!
One of my fondest Christmas memories was when my brother and I got a PlayStation 1 for Christmas, the excitement and entertainment was amazing, we had graduated from Gameboys to 3D graphics. My brother is very competitive so it was the best to win against him in the car racing game (Tommi Mäkinen Rally). I can't remember what other game we got but I do remember he and I playing Command on Conquer years later and that background music is burned into my mind :D
Years later with my own kid I have a greater appreciation for the expense and planning our parents went through to find one for us.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 347 ms ] threadAnother was getting thru to mom while I was in Europe and watching the phone counter start counting up really fast.
My kids have too much these days and wonder if they will ever experience something like that.
Here in Australia, Christmas is in our summer, so we used to have watermelon seed wars where everyone runs around the house eating watermelon as fast as possible to build up a mouthful of seeds to use as 'ammo' to machine gun spit at everyone else.
Was hilarious, and a very long time ago...
broke up with her in may this year; this is my first xmas all alone. all my friends and family moved out of state years ago, and i spent all my vacation days and sick days studying for a coding interview that i had last week for my dream job. i bombed it, partly because of anxiety, partly because ive been procedural programming for 8 years and suck at OOP principles, and partly because the PTSD makes it tough to study/concentrate around xmas.
anyway, im drinking a bottle of mccallan, out here alone with my two cats, and its still a better xmas than the last two years. apologies for trauma dumping, just tipsy i guess.
oh and i did get the oracle java 8 associate cert last night, so i got that going for me, which is nice.
edit:
best xmas memory was playing KOTOR 1 when it came out, while eating a big tub of dansk sugar cookies. that dantooine music was lovely
If it's any encouragement, I bombed a bunch of interviews during my 14 months of unemployment, but in January I'm returning to a position I loved.
Just saying that you shouldn't extrapolate too much from even a string of such things.
Hope your new year is awesome.
Sorry about the job, happens to the best of us. I think when it's the dream job you're that much more likely to bomb. I quit my dream job because it couldn't pay the bills and joined a place I thought I wouldn't last at, now in year 8 it turns out it was the dream job.
anyway. got surgery to fix that apnea issue in july, and ive been getting back to my old self.
edit: the other jarring thing was just how successful i was at work. anyone that uses AWS lambda benefited from my projects in 2023/2024 - some of that stuff got L10 visibility inside AWS. i guess i spent all my mental energy at work, even though i was (and still am) fully remote/WFH. anyway it was tough to reconcile my failures in my personal life with my successes in work life - i was both a failure and a success.
All that’s a long way to say I’m sorry for what you went through, and if any of what I’ve said resonates, you’re not alone and I encourage you to forgive yourself.
Enjoy your Christmas. Being alone ain’t the worst thing in the world.
[Insert TMI story.] Cycle of abuse: https://psychcentral.com/health/cycle-of-abuse
Fortunately, it ended ok. I healed for over a year before dating again, and dated someone for exactly a year to make sure it was good relationship. It still is. :D
Merry Christmas.
I feel this. Can't tell you how many interviews I bombed because of anxiety. The worst one I had spent like 3 months interviewing with the company, passed all of their tests, etc. When it came time to meet the team, I just froze. I answered all of their questions correctly, but it was like I wasn't myself. I became extremely slow, stammering my words, and just blanking out. The CTO couldn't take it anymore and said "just stop talking. This isn't going to work". I quickly ended the call without saying anything and felt so defeated. What is wrong with me.
That was years ago. I'm much better now, mostly because I have the confidence in my skills, but it still comes up, especially when people are being aggressive during interviews.
Anyway, Merry Christmas. I wish you the best.
The range of human experiences is significant. Humans communicate using the same languages and same expressions but mentally, different people are wired very differently.
Trauma seems to spread like a virus.
But my favorite was Christmas 1999. My girlfriend was out of town with her family and there was no reason to go home to mine, so I was alone (my roommates were with their families too). I decided to go to the movies in Emeryville.
I was going to see Galaxy Quest, Bicentennial Man, and Man on the Moon. The timing lined up perfectly to see all three. About 50 other people were there to do the same thing. When it was time to go in for the first movie, a staff member came out and told us that it would start about 30 minutes late. This would of course cause us to miss all the other movies.
About 30 people stepped forward at the same time and asked to speak to the manager. :). We explained to him that it would throw our whole schedule off. Since it was Christmas, he was kind enough to adjust the schedule so that we could all see all three movies.
That was a great day.
https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=feature&releas...
Many consider 1994 the best single year for movies ever.
I got really lucky that that was also my peak movie going year.
Pulp Fiction
Lion King
The Mask
Four Weddings and a Funeral
Dumb and Dumber
The Crow
Speed
True Lies
Interview with the Vampire
Natural Born Killers
Ace Ventura
Stargate
Clerks
The list goes on. Lot's of movies that turned out to be classics or cult classics, or the start of some great careers.
This was a time when movies were on VHS tapes, and there was a bit before the start of the movie that said something like “have you seen every movie ever made?”[1]
And at the time it certainly felt like we had watch nearly everything that store and one other had over the previous five years.
1. https://youtu.be/VfuzebAAesk?si=z3-HYkZwJK6mmtWP - I think there was at least a couple variations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equilibrium_(film)
But the elevator lobby shootout from Matrix -- that scene ruled my home theater configuration for at least a decade
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I watched Dark City years after watching The Matrix (on opening in the cinema) and I enjoyed it very much, have watched it multiple times over the years.
Here is Dark City’s director Alex Proyas: “Alex Proyas on: The Matrix copying Dark City” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytxjsetVIRM
And this is a juxtaposition of some scenes with background music: “The Matrix vs. Dark City.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moW17YHl6B8
This is Mr. Hand [Richard O’Brien] talking in ”Memories of Shell Beach”:
> It was a very groovy movie, you see?
> I remember saying to Rufus Sewell [who played the protagonist], I said, you know, it actually, truthfully, it really doesn’t matter, does it, whether it’s a box-office success because we’re going to get paid as actors anyway, sorry Alex [Proyas] but this is true, we’re gonna get paid as actors anyway and isn’t it nice to be part of something which is groovy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrK4U6PEu94&t=1029s
Existenz was another unique underappreciated movie of that year and whose theme never got picked by any other movie. When Jude Law realizes that the Chinese food he is eating can be put together to assemble the gun my mind was blown.
Saw all of them in 1999 / 2000, my career direction was decided in that brief period.
Also tried 1973 — same (The Day of the Jackal, Soylent Green, Westworld, The Wicker Man, Papillon, American Graffiti, The Sting, Serpico, Mean Streets, High Plains Drifter, Don't Look Now, Badlands, The Long Goodbye, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Three Musketeers, Fantastic Planet, etc.).
I think they simply made better movies decades ago.
It's Christmas, I shouldn't be so negative.
I think I'll indulge in Alastair Sims' version of "A Christmas Carol".
The other lazy writing is the lack of conflict resolution enabling a continuous source of needless conflict, making an entire show out of a situation that could have easily been resolved if there had been a single ‘adult’ in the room. This has the added problem of normalizing the extreme confrontational or evasive communication styles as opposed to productive engagements. I guess this is what happens when TV raises a generation and then that generation goes on to make their own TV shows, each cycle worse than the previous. As bad as ‘engagement’/‘rage bait’ YouTubers are now I shudder to imagine what the next generation would bring.
Many catchy classic Christmas songs were written by Jewish songwriters.
Christmas in the Heart (2009) - 34th Studio album by Bob Dylan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_in_the_Heart
Rudolph has an odd nose, and he gets chosen to lead all the other Reindeer! Kids love this song. You teach it to them when they are young and they'll never forget it!
"I saw a spiral pad... Forty minutes later that song was written. I wrote all the music and some of the lyrics."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Christmas_Song
- Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
- Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire
- The New Testament
My parents felt otherwise when I was growing up, so my siblings and I weren't allowed to do anything Christmas related, but now my wife and I would do seasonal things like watch a live performance of Nutcracker or Pentatonix or TSO. And can't forget about watching the holiday classic movies like Elf and Die Hard!
Happy holidays I guess.
For example, Christmas trees date back no later than the middle ages:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=m41KXS-LWsY
- Yule
- Dísablót
- Koliada
- Lohri
- Saturnalia
- Yaldā Night
- Nardoqan
In the absence of evidence about the timing being affected by other festivals and in the presence of much evidence that all the actual traditions are far more recent than pagan, I don't believe it's fair to claim Christmas has pagan origins. The absolute best we can do is say that its timing may have been influenced by other, pre-Christian celebrations.
Here's another one on Saturnalia from the same scholar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lsctaPJSvo
Later during Soviet times secularish Christmas traditions including Ded Moroz were moved to New Year's.
My general take is that every major religion has some sort of solstice related celebration.
As near as I can tell the myth of the pagan origins of Christmas has its roots in fundamentalist Christians who wanted to abolish things that aren't contained in the Bible. "Pagan" made a good rhetorical whip at the time, but it's since been taken as a serious approach to history by popular culture.
ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/share/676c8fd1-b6e0-8005-a86f-d43ac17634...
Grok: https://x.com/i/grok/share/8fQKIFO1WGl3nDVZ6uFaJmPTW
†Grok on proving negatives: https://x.com/i/grok/share/kcHkjqzJ5lx5kMyl4GL0nMuw3
I provided a source from a religious studies scholar on Christmas trees specifically (one of the most frequently-cited "pagan" traditions). If you can point me to something with similar provenance I'll read it, but I'm not going to waste time on LLM responses.
Saturnalia? (I’m watching your video.)
Given how diversely Christmas is celebrated, it seems wild to conclude that it hasn’t been significantly affected by predecessor celebrations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lsctaPJSvo
What is the argument for it not having influenced many modern Christmas practices, including but not limited to the celebration’s timing in the West?
FWIW, I'm very open to the timing having been shifted to coincide with other festivals, but that's not what most people mean when they say Christmas has pagan origins. They're not saying that Christmas isn't actually the day Jesus was born (I'm totally on board with that idea), they're saying that X, Y, and Z aspects of the Christmas celebration were originally pagan and were adapted for Christianity. I have seen no compelling evidence in favor of that claim about any aspect of Christmas traditions, and I've seen plenty against.
The drunken revelry?
1. Christmas has its origins in Saturnalia, but the only remaining similarity is the approximate date and the drunkenness.
2. Humans will happily accept any excuse to get drunk during the longest nights of the year.
I lean towards option 2 as a much simpler and more likely explanation.
Personally for me, it's a good excuse to take time off work and hang out and feast with people who also have time off work. I personally think that (at least in the States) it's basically a Commercial Holiday, in that it just encourages over-consumption, consumerisation.
It's not something I personally want to do for my family, but I don't think any less of families that do that.
Soviet style New Year's is still celebrated in a number of post Soviet countries including I believe to some extent in some of the Muslim ones. It's also celebrated by post Soviet Jews in Israel and to some extent the US. Although the recent full scale invasion on Ukraine might effect popularity due to it's Soviet association.
In fact my friend's house is featured in the top link on HN right now. He's helped me with my own show.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42494512
Talk to them about their youth, when they were wild and rebellious. Find out what trouble they caused. Remind them, and it just might crack the encrusted exterior a little bit.
Classic.
If you are Jewish, Christmas obviously isn't nearly as important to your (often nominally) Christian neighbors and there isn't much to do on Christmas day. If you decide you don't want to cook, Chinese restaurants are way over-represented in the choice of open restaurants. Once you do that for a couple years it becomes its own tradition.
I grew up in a Catholic household but my family, after years of making Turkey and spending hours cooking, for the past few years has switched to Chinese food on Christmas. I don't miss the turkey and gravy.
Source: family apocrypha.
This is all apocrypha, so take it with a grain of salt. But my understanding is that this would be a case where marit ayin would not be a significant concern, since the Chinese dishes in question were not visually identifiable as e.g. pork.
Or another framing: if you were a semi-secular family (like mine) that tried to keep a semi-kosher home, it would be easier to eat a dish that contained finely minced pork or shellfish or similar. American Chinese food fits those parameters while also being available on Christmas, etc.
I came into this thread thinking that I don't really have any great Christmas memories. My family was poor growing up, my parents shouldn't have been together for as long as they tried to make it work, and my father had a lot of issues with drugs and alcohol. But now that I think about it, these Christmas Eve memories with my wife are my favorite.
I’ve spent a lot of holidays alone over the last few years, and the HN community was a joy and a comfort every time.
I have the pleasure of spending holidays with family this year, and I’m trying to answer everyone’s questions about computer stuff, I invariably wind up referring to the great comments on HN as the best resource around.
I look forward to spending another year with all of you, and hope you all have a wonderful holiday.
Merry Christmas everyone. :)
Hope everyone was able to slow down the pace a little, connect a little more with people we may have not caught up with recently and send/receive positive vibes. And happy new year.
The best non-Christmas morning memories were just random times I was at family Christmas parties or gatherings. Seeing aunts, uncles, and cousins dancing talking having fun. As a kid, we used to have the parties at family homes, which was always fun and super memorable. Later we moved to a hall as the family got bigger and cousins started to bring their children, in laws, and friends. I can't really point out any particular memory as good; just all the time spent with family, not necessarily caring about what else was going on in the world at the time.
Which ones if you're able to recall?
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0499003/ [2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0208654/ [3] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290683/
My mom was enthralled by Tetris, better at the game than anyone in the house by a good 10 levels, and basically impossible to depose from the controller. I think it softened the blow with Grandma.
A few years ago I was a bit down abd feeling like I'd never experience that kind of excitement and joy again. I've come to realize that now I'm older it's my job to create that same joy in others.
I hope everyone is having a wonderful day and can find a way to create just a little moment of joy for someone else. Merry Christmas!
My third year in college, we had a new Warden (head of college) and while he, like all the other academic staff, generally vacated the college over Christmas, he felt obliged to offer Christmas hospitality.
So he sent out an email to the entire student population: "Any students in college over Christmas are welcome to come to the Warden's Lodge for afternoon tea at 3pm on Christmas Day." -- and as I was the only student in college over the vacation, I had a lovely afternoon talking to the Warden and his wife.
Graduate students generally don't have much interaction with college academic life -- undergrads usually meet with the Warden every term, but grad students are left to the academic departments to supervise -- so it was a rare and precious opportunity.
To everyone else, I hope you have a nice festive break!
One of my fondest Christmas memories was when my brother and I got a PlayStation 1 for Christmas, the excitement and entertainment was amazing, we had graduated from Gameboys to 3D graphics. My brother is very competitive so it was the best to win against him in the car racing game (Tommi Mäkinen Rally). I can't remember what other game we got but I do remember he and I playing Command on Conquer years later and that background music is burned into my mind :D
Years later with my own kid I have a greater appreciation for the expense and planning our parents went through to find one for us.