Christmas time is here again

It's that time of year again. That time when many of us will be erecting a fir in the corner, decking the halls with boughs of holly, and sitting back to enjoy a glass of mulled wine as we roast chestnuts over an open fire.

That's right. It's Christmas, the festive season in which we put our work to one side for a while to enjoy a few well-deserved days off to spend with our friends and family.

But before the festivities can begin, there are numerous chores that must be performed. And one of these, of course, is to send Christmas greetings to all our friends and colleagues.

Traditionally, such messages of comfort and joy have been sent via the postal service. After purchasing a box of Christmas cards, many of us spend hours writing individual messages inside them, after which the cards are duly inserted into envelopes, addressed, and taken down to the Post Office where they are mailed.

In these days of automation, however, some of us no longer leave the comfort of our armchairs to perform the task, preferring to use e-mail greeting cards instead. While such e-mail messages may never have the quite the same personal appeal as a real piece of card with a Christmas scene printed upon it, they certainly are a cost-effective alternative to sending out the real thing.

With such electronic wizardry automating our traditional time-intensive Christmas labors, it's interesting to consider by what means we might be delivering our Christmas greetings to our friends and colleagues in the future.

Well, I think the folks at Edmund Optics might have found the answer. To distribute a Christmas message to their audience in the vision systems design industry, the innovative Edmund Optics team has produced a rather amusing video that they have uploaded onto YouTube where it can be viewed by all and sundry.

But this isn't just any video greeting. Oh no. The entertaining video features a number of Edmund Optics' employees playing a familiar Christmas tune on the company's own range of telecentric lenses. That's right. Watch carefully and you will see the so-called "Telecentric Bell Choir" [click for YouTube video] ringing the lenses to play that Christmas favorite "Carol of the Bells."

From my perspective, this form of sending holiday greetings to friends and family is clearly the wave of the future. What's more -- for Edmund Optics at least -- it might be a way to generate a whole new market for its acoustically-enabled telecentric product line.

Happy holidays!