My Cellphone and Christmas Sharing

Christmas is a time for sharing – and I’m reflecting on how my phone made this so much easier than it used to be.

We live semi-rurally and our family is spread over the globe. Gift buying now often involves a text or email asking for ideas, then a reply with not only ideas but links to possible gifts. A click then lets me inspect ‘the goods’. If the price matches the budget I can buy and usually have it delivered either directly to the lucky family member or here to sit under our tree.  Gift wrapping and a gift card are usually offered – often free.  Beats driving into town, or even all the way to a city for specialist items, finding the shop, wrapping, queueing at the PostShop, fainting at the price… and hoping it arrives on time.

Of course there are those who won’t give hints, newer family members we don’t know well yet and teens who want to choose for themselves – so a gift card is the thing. From my phone I can ‘visit’ most major retailers both here and overseas to purchase a gift card. Some are posted out via snail mail, others delivered via email. – complete with Christmas colours and messages. Simple.

It’s many years since we posted actual Christmas cards. That evolved into an annual newsletter with increasingly sophisticated publishing software enabling a slicker and slicker Lally Times  that became widely anticipated. Early ones were posted, in later years emailed. Somehow the enthusiasm for producing this has waned over recent years. What could have replaced it in 2016 – or could convey New Year’s Greetings for 2017?

• Perhaps a free personalised singing online Christmas card available from a variety of sites.
• A Christmas Blog – or even a Vlog – which would require only an annual entry. A link to it could be sent via text, email, Facebook, What’s App and any other social network or communicating software.
• A free Facebook greeting – of course this would be restricted to those who have a Facebook account but that circle includes more people than we used to send via snail mail.
•  A seasonal greeting text to everyone on my Phone contacts list with seasonal emojis scattered  through. This would’ve been the fastest and easiest though the dentist, Dr, vet etc may have been a little surprised to receive it.

I’m sure there are many more ways to spread Christmas cheer via my phone.

We’ve always had family in the USA so a Christmas phone call is part of our Boxing Day tradition (after 46 years we’ve worked out the Time Zone differences).

Remember when you had to book an international toll call with the Toll operator?  That’s how we started. Then came the time when you didn’t have to book but the Toll operator still made the connection.  I think this was when your own voice echoed as if you were speaking in a tin can – and only one end of the call could speak at a time.  Next came the miracle of international direct dialling – probably when phones still had a real dial rather than numbers to push.  You didn’t always get through straight away as the system would get overloaded.  Finally it had become as easy as phoning someone in the same town – and sounded just as close.

But now there are options.  We can call on our landline or  cellphone or use the free services like FaceTime, Skype, and Facebook’s Messenger service. These offer not just talking but video so we can see one another across the world from the phone I carry in my pocket.  This would’ve seemed like science fiction future in 1970.

Watch a toddler today with a phone. They get a surprise if they can only hear a voice. They look puzzled. For them, seeing the person they’re talking to is normal.

How things have changed to bring us closer together – ideal for Christmas sharing.

by Kaye Lally, Age Hacker