I’d like to wish everyone a joyous and memorable Christmas. I’m grateful to have this time with my family so that I can  try to make each and every Christmas one that my children will remember and tell their children about. Our family traditions are unique to us and, while they may resemble traditions other families share, we have grown them with our own special flavoring. The seeds of these traditions began with those that my wife and I each had with our families as we grew up. We’ve taken these and made them into something unique and special to us.

• We always follow Santa on Norad’s Santa Tracker using Google Earth. As Santa makes his way along his route, the kids’ excitement builds and eventually come to tell us that they need to go to bed so that Santa will come to our house.
• We always watch A Christmas Story at least once, but sometimes it just stays on in the background as TBS plays it in their yearly 24 hour marathon. I first watched this movie in elementary school as the last activity we did before school let out for Christmas break. Everyone said Ralphie looked just like me and I accepted that as a compliment, though you might be surprised that I’m quite not so cute anymore.
• The kids always try to convince us to open a gift Christmas Eve and each year we insist that they should wait until Christmas morning and open all of their gifts at once. Inevitably, though, the kids win the argument against our feeble protests and we let them open just one.
• The kids always bake cookies for Santa to eat along with a tall glass of cold milk. The last couple of years, though, Santa has requested sugar-free cookies and skim milk.
• We always try to get up before the kids so that we can have the camera ready so that when they come wandering out of their rooms wiping the sleep from their eyes and squinting at the bright lights, we can see their expressions as they gaze on all of the things that were left under the tree for them.

These are just a few of the hundreds of little things we do to make this holiday our own. This year will be the first year that we don’t have to travel at all to see family. We’re so excited to be able to spend all of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day together, playing with our new toys.

I was appalled when I realized the other day that the most recent post I made was on January 4, 2009. I find it (Alanis Morissette) ironic that the first (and almost only) post of the year was about my goal to become a more social person. Go ahead and read that post (or just find it on the main page, you won’t have to scroll very far). I’ll wait.

So, how did I do, you ask?

Small talk was one area that I actually felt like I improved. I made a point to speak with people I randomly met in the elevator and to ask acquaintances about their families or some other event in their lives that I knew about. I still need to work on this, but it helped to learn how to break the ice.

Engaging in debates with people in subjects that I’m only moderately versed in or about controversial subjects is still something I need to work on. I did make an effort to do this with people I was already comfortable with and had a good idea of how they would react, but I didn’t go much beyond that.

Out of all of the areas that I identified to work on, I thought online conversations would be the easiest to tackle. It turns out it was the most difficult. I know that my blogging suffered greatly because of lack of time (or initiative) and what little I did have was taken by short posts to Facebook and Twitter. Even then, those were primarily one-way conversations and my goal was to increase my interactions with people.

It turns out that I’m of two minds about online social interactions. One one hand, I love the openness of everything and ease of finding whatever information you could want. On the other hand, there’s privacy to be concerned about as well as the very real threat of saying or doing something wrong. Anonymity (well, perceived anonymity anyway) makes people a lot bolder when they decide to express themselves online. They’ll say things online that they’d never say to your face. I try to treat people online the same way I’d treat them in person (the online version of the Golden Rule?), but I’ve been around long enough to know that not everyone follows that philosophy.

I desperately want to express my views  about any number of important (to me), but controversial topics. I don’t get much of an opportunity in the offline world to do this either (my wife puts up with occasional grumbling and not much else). The whole “don’t talk about religion and politics” thing has been ingrained into me. For example, what if a potential future employer Googles my name, finds my post on the controversial subject of the mating habits of Northern European red-tailed barn swallow? He or she may take the exact opposite view and decide that anyone who believes what I do on such an important subject could not make a good employee. Opportunity lost. It could happen!

Okay, so what does all this mean for 2010? I plan to continue the momentum I’ve started this year with becoming more social. To up the ante just a little bit, I’m going to try my best to blog at least once a week if not more often. You’ll just have to skip those posts that you don’t agree with and tell me what a great job I did sticking to my goal.

This week I finally sat down and tackled a project I’ve been meaning to get to for at least 6 months. The project was to revamp my blog and create a site which would essentially become the hub of my online presence. A single place where someone could find out about me, connect with me, and get to know me. In other words, a lifestreaming site.

The idea first started when I registered a domain of my own, digitalcraig.me. I started by making it simply a redirect to a storytlr site, a hosted lifestreaming solution. I kept my blog over at wordpress.com and the storytlr site would still pull in posts from the blog so that everything would be centralized, right? In reality, it didn’t feel centralized at all. WordPress.com and storytlr.com were just other sites that I joined that provided a service, nothing different that Twitter or Facebook or Flickr. I still felt I needed something of my own before it would truly be centralized.

This point hit home even further when storytlr announced that they were shutting down operations on December 31, 2009.  Although I give them credit for shutting down in an orderly fashion and providing tools to export my data, I was still a little shocked to realize that 3rd parties owned every piece of my online presence. If all of them suddenly shutdown or decided to sell all of my personal information (I’m looking at you suspiciously, Facebook) then there isn’t anything I can really do about it.

So, here we are. A brand new blog on my very own webhost under my very own domain. As an added bonus, this page contains links to my profiles on over a dozen other sites. If you want to know more about me, look me up on any of those sites. If you want to know what I’m currently reading, find me on Goodreads. If you want to know what news I’m reading, find my Google Reader shared items. If you want to know what short witty comments I’m making on Twitter, you’ll find a link to me there.

You may also notice a link at the top of the page called “Lifestream”. This is the page that aggregates all of my activity on those other sites into a timeline on a single page. It lists every Twitter post, every movie I rented at Netflix, every blog entry I write, and every news item I share.

On the other hand, you may not care. Either you don’t know who I am and don’t care or you simply aren’t into the minutiae of my life. That’s fine, it’s there if you’re interested and you can ignore it if you’re not.