A (partially) hand made Christmas.

I live with a 10 & 5 year old. The past couple of Christmases have involved a lot of plastic, construction and batteries. 

Don't get me wrong - I'm not opposed to these things per se. I'm not drawing a line in the sand against 'consumerism', or suggesting I want to deny my kids in the cool toy of the year on some itchy-scratchy granola principle. I just have a little worry that the joy has a risk of being diluted in a shower of glitter, lights and gifts that are too quickly outgrown or broken down. 

I have always balked at tinsel, and found more joy in the ornaments my Bride made by hand out of desperation our first year in England, when we realized that we hadn't set our Christmas accoutrements aside for the packers back in California. Combine this with the covetous glances I've annually cast on the 'theme' trees in the local shops, and I made the grand statement that this year, we'd have a "Christmas made by hand!" 

When I heard the crazy that had just come out of my mouth I immediately tried to back away from this statement. 

"This year," I amended, "We'll have a Christmas with many things made by hand! And by many, I mean some. In this one room over here. Not the main room. Or the main tree. But a few. And it shall be awesome. "

My Bride nodded and pet me on the head. Which proves once again that she has the patience of a saint.

Some of the ideas I had were to look back at some of the ways our home might have been decorated some time ago. It's a 1739 colonial. I wasn't sure how ambitious I could get in the 3 weeks I had between making that statement and our Christmas party, but I figured I'd give it a go. 

By starting early, though, I did manage to work in a few things in time for the party. I made garland for the fireplace from walnuts and small wooden beads that I think turned out nicely. It took me about two bags of walnuts to figure out how to drill the hole without cracking the shell. And even then, I'd still lose about one in four. But hey! Garland! 

Boxwood and fir branches gathered and hung, and a few clementimes strategically scattered and it feels about right. 

Greenery from our yard has always made up a part of our decorations for the Christmas party. It's easy enough to gather in bunches to hang from the sconces and lighting, and it brings the scent and feel of the holidays in the house in a way that I particularly enjoy. 

It helps that in both this house and the last, the designers were apparent sconce-o-philiacs, providing 10 or 12 convenient places to mount our holiday swags around the first floor living area. 

Thanks, crazy designer!

For years I struggled with the right way to display the Christmas cards we received. It used to be easy to set them out on any flat surface, but then the postcard-photo-of-your-kids became a fad. And what do you do then? 

Last year I found a big box of old wooden clothespins. Hang a rope. Hook them on. And make merry with the cards, people. 

Also: more greens, and another random orange. Laura Ingles Wilder told me that oranges are Christmas-y. Go with it. 

Which probably explains why I sliced and dried a bunch of oranges to hang with red ribbon on the small tree in the dining room. Every year we end up with two trees. Originally, I got an 'extra', smaller tree and called it the 'family' tree, and the big tree was the 'formal' tree - the one with the presents.  This was code for "Sure, kids. We can hang your macaroni ornaments on that tree over there." 

Somehow I lost control of this, and they got swapped around. But they did leave the little tree up to me. Which is something. 

I rounded it off with the old Christmas paper cut-outs from that first Christmas in England I mentioned above, and a simple ribbon garland cut out of plain burlap. The star was made by tying some twiggy garden remnants together. 

(I also tried drying lemon slices to complement the orange slices that turned out so prettily. You know what happens when you try and dry lemon slices? They turn black. Which is not at all as Christmas-y as I hoped.)

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We let our Elf on the Shelf in on the fun as well. If you haven't experienced the joy of the Elf, it's a little figure that magically moves around your house into new places after the kids are asleep. He watches you all day, and then disappears off to the North Pole to report on your behavior at night, returning before you wake the next day. 

You are supposed to name your elf when he appears in your family. Many of our friends named their elf things like "Snowflake," or "Minty," or "Jingles." One friend reported that his kid named their elf "Dragon," because he likes dragons. 

Our kids named our elf "Barry James." Because our kids apparently have an instinct for a funky sort of groove. 

And who's to say that Santa doesn't need an elf capable of laying down a smooth bass line during the off season?

For years, we've been carrying on another of our favorite hand-made traditions. When my Bride was a little girl, her family would hide stacks of coins in all the corners of the house, and on New Year's eve, all the cousins would get together and tear through the house on a mad dash, filling their pockets with change, and scrambling over one another, laughing to find them all. This gave you a little extra cash in your pocket to start the new year on, and a few extra memories of laughter with your cousins. 

Our generation was a little slower to create a new crop of cousins, and we've always lived pretty far away from them to boot. So a few years ago, we gave this particular tradition our own twist. We decided to incorporate this as a part of our Christmas party, and make a special point of it with the kids of all the friends and neighbors we invite over. Each year, we make up dozens and dozens of these little crepe paper packages, filled with chocolate and real coins. This year, I think we had about 180 coin packs, expecting around 45 kids.  Before the party, I walk around the house, scattering them around the baseboards, in the corners and around the house. 

You can tell the kids that have been to our Christmas party before. They're the ones that walk in the house already scanning for the little packs of coins. They nod hello, go distractedly get a plate of food, and walk around the house mumbling to themselves as they spot new hiding places. 

About halfway through the party, we gather all the kids, warn the adults to stay towards the centers of the rooms, and countdown "3...2...1... go!"

Kids are everywhere underfoot. And in less than 10 minutes, they're piled around the coffee table or huddled in groups, counting their loot and munching on chocolate. 

Maybe it doesn't bring them the same kind of good fortune for the new year, but it provides us with plenty of laughs, and a welcome chance to share a little holiday tradition with our friends. 

We still used a lot of our standard ornaments - many of them have special memories because of where we got them, or because of what they represent. But we left a lot packed away as well, and I, at least, took a little more joy from the start of this season because everyone was involved in both coming up with and making the decorations, hanging them on the tree, or getting ready to invite so many of our friends and neighbors over to spend a little time before the holiday.  

And somehow, I think we started a new tradition or two this year worth keeping. 

And now, for a moment of geekery

New rule: If I have an electronic thingy (laptop, smartphone, tablet) in front of me, and you have an electronic thingy in front of you: you are not allowed to give me paper.

New rule addendum: If there is a projector in the room and you STILL try and give me paper, I get to kick you in the shins.

I'm head of IT for a biotechnology & reseach company. Which means I get to work with a lot of smart people. Smart people that have laptops and iPads. Smart people who still want to use their laptops and iPads to print out paper to hand to me. Me who also has a laptop and iPad. You get where I'm going. They're not evil. It's just habit. It's the same at offices everywhere. 

Once a year or so, my team does a comprehensive analysis of how much we spend on toner, printer maintenance, cost per page, etc, and we decide what to do about it. We print tens and tens of thousands of pages a week. We recently switched out all our printers for these really cool Xerox machines that run off of wax instead of traditional ink. Very green and cost friendly. And every print-out smells like a box of crayola. It's cool, and it saves us a bunch of money. But wouldn't it be even better if we reduced the amount of printouts we used in the first place? How many pages are printed each week that could be simply avoided? 1%? 5%? 10%? 

But other than kicking people in the shins when they make bad choices, how do you find a more gentle and elegant way to use that information more than once a year, and help people make good choices every day?

 A few years ago, a company was founded out of the MIT labs called Ambient Devices made a really nifty bit of kit called the Ambient Orb. It turned a metric into a color, and put it over in the corner of your visiion as a constant reminder. It's easier and more "ambient" than a website you have to log in to (hence the name).  And it's kind of a cool, interesting, and easy way to display information where details are less important than the general state. The beauty is in the simplifying the interface to a color that provides meaning to your metric.

Along with all that paper we consume, we also use a lot of power. We make and store biological material. We have to keep it cold.We have a lot of freezers. I mean, a lot. They use a lot of electricity. We're the single biggest consumer of electricity in the local city.  

We do a lot to make things more efficient, and have found all the big opportunies. Still, is there stuff we could do to reduce that by 1%? 3%? 5%? Probably. Switch off my monitor when I go home. Turn off the lights in the conference roomwhen the meeting is over. Those kinds of things. They add up. They accumulate into real savings, and real impact over time.  

But just like people who print stuff off, I forget to hit the switch on my way out the door.   I can log into my power company account and see my home energy consumption in almost real time, any time I want. But I don't. I check it once a month or once a quarter. The data is there. But I'm not using it to change my behavior on a daily basis because of the barrier to getting it. (which is pretty low, I must say). 

Goals to reduce waste and energy consumption by - for instance - 5% per year are pretty typical company aspirations. We're ISO 14001 certified. We have an environmental mission statement. We're officially green. But people still give me paper I don't want, and I still forget to turn off the lights. 

It got me thinking: What if we had one of those orbs at the front desk when you walk in. Green means we were on track yesterday for our 5% savings. Blue means we're between 96-99% of 'norm'. Red means we're using more paper, more electricity, more whatever than we want to use as a company. Would it change behavior to know that yesterday was a bad day, and today you could help offset it? Without impacting the business success, would it be more effective than getting an email from me once a year ranting about printers?

And how rewarding would it be to see it move back from 'disappointed red' to 'healthy green'? 

That kind of feedback mechanism is simply missing in a lot of things - we know we want to achieve X, but we have little way to know if we're doing so real time. Wouldn't it be great if we could find a way to leverage the data we already have in a way that provides that kind of visual cue to our success & commitment? 

So, I followed up on with Ambient Devices. They stopped selling the orbs commercially a few years back, but they'd 'be happy to make a special production run for me, if I committed to buy 3,000 or more. 

Um. No. 

But how hard could this freaking be? It's a glass ball with some colored lights in it. Controlled by some simple little input string. They were selling about twenty bucks worth of parts for a hundred bucks and a monthly subscription fee. 

Now I felt challenged. No way could I not build one of these things. Thanks to the internet, I found out I was not even close to the first.

I read through a few of these DIY versions, and picked up an Arduino board last week (a programmable microprocessor board), and spent some time futzing with it. It's generally programmed in C, with a few additional functions specific to the board (things like controlling the voltage going to a specific pin, or using the serial in/out for different ways of relaying information to the board). It's an open source standard, and the creativity that people have shown with it knows no ends. It looked (and really is) easy enough to pick up and have a go. But you should have seen me trying to remember how to use resistors - I'm a computer guy. The last time I did this kind of thing was in a EE class in university more than a couple of decades ago. 

Once I sorted it out with a simple connection of 3 LEDs (red, green and blue), I set up a sketch to control the intensity of each, interpreted by a standard webformat color (e.g. #ffffff), input over a terminal screen (the arduino is connected to my laptop via a usb cable).  (that's purple (#ff00ff), green (#00ff00) and red (#ff0000) below). 

I popped off the hook end of a frosted glass christmas ornament, and dropped it over the LEDs and voila. Not a bad ambient orb.

I added an ethernet shield, and gave it an IP address, and added a little web service to allow it to be controlled over the network, plugged into any network port. The LEDs weren't quite bright enough, so I added a BlinkM MaxM LED, which has about a hundred-fold intensity. Boom. Pretty up the base and we're in business. 

Now I have an indicator that I can set up in common areas as a simple, visual reminder of how we're doing on our goals. We could use this for anything, of course - it's easy to configure for any metric you care to track. I'll be happy if I stop walking out of meetings with more paper than I walk in with. 

Now if only I could figure out how to fix a string of Christmas lights without having to throw the whole thing out and buy a new one.

Sometimes, living things are unpredictable

Today I got a call from the butcher. One of my pigs had two broken femurs. Which translates into two less prosciuttos I can make - the blood from the contusion settles into the muscle and doesn't drain, and the surrounding meat is unusable. 

 

I called the farmer. It's pretty clear that the pig didn't walk on or off the truck with two broken legs. The bones were more or less splintered. It didn't - couldn't - have moved far without complaining vociferously. It looked almost like the pig had tried to back out of the chute at the last minute and been pushed forward with a tractor or hit by a heavy gate. But the farmer had loaded them and unloaded them without an issue.  (and our farmer is a great guy - He's a dairy farmer, and deals with livestock every day. Not to mention he's my neighbor. His word is more than enough to satisfy on any front). So that wasn't it. 

 

So I called the slaughterhouse. And got an "Ah. Yeah."  

 

When pigs are slaughtered, they're led to the killing floor and stunned. They're then hoisted and drained by opening an artery. It's a fairly peaceful, low-stress way to go, which is humane for the animal, and better for the product. Right after the high electric shock that stuns them -  if they jerk or otherwise react, they can thrash about, preventing the rope which loops around their back legs and hoists them from getting set properly. And boom. In the worst of accidents: broken legs. 

 

No one wants to see this, least of all the slaughterhouse. It's unfortunate, and unpleasant for anyone involved but sometimes? Living things are unpredictable. As the saying goes: Livestock happens.

  

I get it, and I sympathize, but I also balked a bit at paying for unusable meat.  No one won here (least of all the pig), so I threw it on the table to see how the various parties would respond. 

 

The farmer knocked some out of his price. Which is painful for him, because the price of grain is up more than 20% this year.  But he and I have been doing business for years, and he knows I'll be back for more. 

 

The slaughterhouse knocked out their price for that pig, which is fair, but means they're eating into their own margin, since all the rest of their work was still done.

 

I'm paying a bit more per pound because I want to meet these guys part way. The butcher won't have to prep and bag the bad meat, so I will see some lesser amount net there as well. My overall cost per pound will be up a bit, but I feel good.

 

And I thought it worth sharing, because this situation underlined the value of knowing and dealing fairly with as many parts of your supply chain as you can. Not only was this a reality of dealing with the processing of livestock into food that we've kind of forgotten about or hidden away from our daily lives, this was also the kind of fair dealing and relationships that supported agro-business for most of history.

 

(In good news: the bacon parts are still totally edible. And the other pig was flawless.)

 

So: go find a farmer and give him a hug.  I'm feeling thankful.