Twas the night before Christmas.

“The Night Before Christmas”

(with apologies to Clement Clarke Moore, whose “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” is now in the public domain)

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and in my home office
Not a creature was stirring, not even my mouse;
The code strings were hung by the mind’s eye with care,
In hopes that St. Linux soon would be there;

My staff were all snuggled quite still in their beds,
And visions of run-times danced in their heads;
While my wife’s RSS reader, and I done with News,
Had just settled down for a long winter’s snooze,

When back of my screensaver there arose such a clatter,
I ran to the office to see what was the matter.
Re-booting my old slow PC from c: drive,
I waited for Windows’ trusty home screen to arrive.

The glow from my screen on my new-woken eyes
Gave a sparkle of mid-day to icons, any size,
When, what to my wondering ears should appear,
But the sound of a server, now wasn’t that queer?

And a man lounged behind, whom I knew would be kind to us
I knew in a moment it must be St. Linux.
With no error messages his programs he ran through,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;

“Now, Hadoop! now, WordPress! now, Handbrake and Pidgin!
On, Ubuntu! Mozilla! Apache and Tizen!
From the top of the cloud! For the thrill of it all
Now run Sudo! Run Sudo! Run Sudo all!”

As errors that line up in queues to be fixed
They ran on my system and their data got mixed
So up to my my menu the cursors they flew,
With his arms full of software, and St. Linus there too.

And there, laid before me
All downloaded, serene
I saw them all running right there on my screen
As St. Linus himself let his visage be seen.

He was dressed in a polo, with his hair all a-flutter
I thought he might speak, or at least he might stutter
A flash drive he had on a lanyard round his neck
And he looked like a friend I’d once roused from my deck.

His eyes — how they smiled! his cheeks were so merry!
His manner as calm as a child picking berries!
His whole warm wry face held the warmth of a glow,
That I knew from my own life meant his code made him glow.

The remains of his coffee I could smell on his breath,
And the warmth of it circled us both like a wreath;
He had a broad face and just the hint of a belly,
That put me in mind of a croissant with jelly.

He was pleasant, polite, a right jolly young elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;
A wink from his eye and a twist of the drive ,
Soon gave me to know I would nothing but thrive;

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
He loaded my hard drive, then turned with a smirk,
And looking around once more, not to linger
He left me right then, by just moving his finger

He returned to his server, to his software he whistled,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
OPEN SOFTWARE TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD-NIGHT!