Ahh, the holidays - time for warmth, family, a spirit of charity (or greed, depending on your wont), and days off. Many of us spend our holidays vacationing, shopping, worshipping, and trying to rekindle childhood memories or feelings. However, many of us computing professionals spend our holiday season in some other ways, don't we?

Days in a Row
One of the real problems with the holidays is that everyone is doing all of those previously mentioned things, so they're not at work. That, of course, opens up windows of time to perform all those processes we had trouble figuring out how to take care of during the year.

If you have a couple of work days in a row, in all likelihood you're going to get your feet firmly ensconced in endless upgrades. Upgrades are that constant series of ways that large software corporations make us all spend the money left in the budget. They're a way for us to make sure our maintenance contracts remain current. And, most important, it's easier to implement them when all the users are gone. There are testing labs to run, and individual changes on each PC are simpler without having to work around users and fuss over time or problems.

Hardware Upgrades
Hardware upgrades are another big favorite of IT managers for those who did not get their vacation requests in early. Days in a row means we can bring down servers, replace rogue memory chips, and fix any other hardware that needs to be replaced. During the gradual boom of client/server in the mid-eighties, we upgraded server space at year end. This was at a time when we were upgrading NCR boxes to a single gigabyte of hard-drive storage. We thought we were in extremely tall cotton. It was during this time that, as an operator, I had to spool print jobs into a print queue, do a control break to stop the spooling, print out what had found its way into the spooler, and then restart the job in another print file. I could then delete the first piece that I had printed - as there was not enough room to simply create all that I had to. These days I have more than a gigabyte just in music on my personal PC.

But upgrading hardware is another joyous holiday tradition. I've also noted that a lot of network reconfiguring takes place during the happy holiday season. If you've been adding users throughout the year, and you've made cable tangles or had to add people outside of their normal wiring groups, this is the time to clean house.

Year-End Processes
Another fine kettle of fish for our Yuletide is running all those closing jobs. Accounting always has an endless stream of processes that they're forced to run at the end of the year - closing periods, closing accounts, and creating new ones. Final tallies are taken, allowing management to determine if bonuses will be given out in February after accounting is finally finished.

We always ran our year-end backups as well, which went into a permanent archive. The final year file-save can and often is also used to do a system restore, compressing data back into nice, neat, even blocks with bleary-eyed computer operators changing tapes, cartridges, or disc packs.

All of the end-of-year reporting must be done. Now that we have had time to run the final year adjustments and closes for accounting, there are an armload of reports that must be run to show annual totals and final tallies. All these things can and often do take place during the Christmas and New Year's break.

Employee Evaluations
This is yet another task that managers and supervisors far and near must sit and prepare at year end. Many nights of a Christmas break are spent going over the success or failure of projects, goals met, team spirit rendered, and enthusiasm plucked. Do we find ourselves checking off boxes and writing comments by the Christmas lights? Far too often. It's unfortunate at times that these evaluations often take place at the end of the year. Budgets can be strained and decisions facing managers can mean a grim return from holiday breaks. It isn't always so, but sometimes it is.

Christmas in Seattle
Up here a lot of companies close down completely. There's a lot of emphasis on quality time at home. Just to give a couple of examples: Boeing closes down many of their plants and shops at Christmas time. People are sent home and the campuses are deserted. Sometimes the machinists strike at the end of the year…celebrating their holidays on the picket lines. Microsoft is a series of campuses all but abandoned during the holidays. But the hospitals never slow down, nor do the civil servants, the workers who keep the infrastructure of the city and state up and running. And, of course, there are the ladies who cut my hair, who never seem to take a break at all.

I Find Holiday Joy in the Stylist Chair
I usually get my hair cut as part of the Christmas package. I like to go in because they listen to the Jimmy Buffet Christmas album, and learn more English by singing along with it.

"JINGER BEARS, JHIINGER BEEEARS, Jinger alldawayy doot doot doot doot." At first it was just one girl quietly singing. When she ran out of words she would fill in with doot doot doots, and then when she could take it no longer she lapsed into the "ckrop, krap crip jhhng nee nahhh" filling in the musical holes as best she could. Then her girlfriends wandered into the room to watch her trim the bear's beard in the chair, and to join in the chorus of "Jingle Bells." The daughters of song kept it going through the rest of the cut, and talked very quickly to one another and giggled a lot. They asked how tall I was. Then sent me on my way, "Merry chreesamas?" I don't know how many of their statements ended up sounding like questions, but that was part of the charm.

I won't have to do any year-end processing this year; I won't have any projects to finish. So I finally find a little Christmas spirit with the Buddhists, singing Jingle Bells to me in a strip mall near the Wonder Bread thrift store, with the freezing rain coming down around me. I come home to warm coffee with my wife LaNae, and a frosty walk with the bullmastiffs, and then a rousing round of Jingle Bells; maybe we'll have Christmas after all.