Happy Holidays: take the time to decorate the trees lining the highway. Some years, they've decorated as many as 150 trees. And it does a tremendous amount to brighten up an otherwise cold, dark, and snowy prairie landscape.

• Dec 23, 2011

  Happy Holidays 2011

• My parents live near a married couple in Iowa, both in their eighties. Each December, they take the time to decorate the trees lining the highway. Some years, they've decorated as many as 150 trees. And it does a tremendous amount to brighten up an otherwise cold, dark, and snowy prairie landscape.
  
  Winters everywhere can be cold and dark with short days and long nights. It's no coincidence, then, that many cultures incorporate lights and decoration into their winter holidays that fall around the winter solstice. And that theme inspired our holiday doodle this year.
  

  
  The interactive doodle in action.
   

  Working with our doodlers, we had the bright idea to string lights along the Google homepage (and, because we can, added some interactive features). Of course, instead of using nails and hopelessly tangled strings of lights, we used JavaScript, Closure, and HTML5 or Flash to play the music (depending on the browser).
  
  So, even if we've got nothing on these guys, we're pretty pleased with how it turned out.
  
  Happy holidays, and we will see you in the new year.
  
  Posted by Nathan Naze, Software Engineer

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