Christmas, technology in the mix

Does new technology mix with ancient rituals? Do computers have any place in the family closeness that has come to be synonymous with Christmas? To put the question in perspective, I relay a perspective I found by following my own ritual of peeping into the Internet to pick up tidbits about whatever is special that day. Like many others, I used to complain that Christmas had become too commercial.

But at least some students of the history of Christmas see it as

the other way around: The industrial revolution which led to production of suitable not-too-expensive gifts was largely responsible for the conversion of the celebration of Christmas from “a raucous public event” to an intimate family event centered on gift-giving. Nineteenth-century technology, which gave rise to cheap printing and postal services, gets credit for the emergence of the Christmas card. Twentieth-century technologies of tele-communication and recording also deserve their share in making Christmas what it is in American culture.

In short, Xmas and technology do mix and are connected in many ways that you can explore via your computer or by reading a wonderful book by Roger Highfield called “The Physics of Christmas” (which, by the way, I found by searching for “Christmas” on the Internet).

But what about the computer itself? The gifts, the CD player and even the TV fit comfortably in the living room with the tree and the fire and the feel of family togetherness. The clunky cable-tangled cross between a TV set and a typewriter that has become a standard image of “the computer” certainly doesn’t feel right in this context. But let me give two arguments for not dismissing the idea that computers might come to have place in our family celebrations whether we call them Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or whatever.

The first argument urges, when you think “computer,” to think not what it is but what it is becoming. I can’t resist making a plug for the laptops by illustrating the point by the fact that every seventh grader in the state can tell you how portability and wireless connection takes the technology an extra step to being truly “personal” (which PCs very much are not). But anything that exists today is just poor intimation of what will be there a very few years into the future.

The second argument urges you to try my ritual of bringing a little bit of research into personal and family events. In our family we often enrich the experience of a movie by peeping at reviewers with very different opinions, checking on historical references or knowing more about the directors and writers. Doing this with a computer is always incredibly richer and more sociable than trying to find that kind of information in books.

For me one of the richest of

such adventures in learning has been spending a couple of hours each year exploring some aspect

of Christmas.

I wouldn’t bring the clunky computer to the fireside but I might try to bring into the family learning culture a tradition of making a time at which everyone tells of some discovery, perhaps around a theme such as the Americanization of Christmas. Did you know that the name Santa Claus came about as an Americanization of the Dutch name Sinterklaas brought by the settlers who gave New York its old name New Amsterdam? Or that the Coca-Cola Co. has a half-legitimate claim to have created the figure we know as Santa by commissioning a Swedish artist, Haddon Sundblom, to paint a series of Santa pictures that were given wide publicity in Coke ads in the 1930s?

These can now easily be found on the Internet together with pictures by the American artist Thomas Nast that show that the Coca-Cola claim is somewhat over-stated. But in any case, the image of Santa our children take for granted is very different from the images they’ll find exploring other places and other times. Sinterklaas might have a name that sounds like the one we use, but was a far more sedate figure with Dutch breeches, a pipe and a brimmed hat.

And so on and so on. My purpose isn’t to give you a lesson in Santa history but to incite you to use Christmas to enrich the family learning culture and, of course, vice versa.

Seymour Papert is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Distinguished Computer Scientist at the University of Maine and a member of the Maine Learning Technology Task Force. He may be contacted at Papert@midmaine.com.