JANUARY 2012 - Know what I miss? Anticipation, bad pictures of cute people and kids playing together.
What took them away? Technology.
Thanks to my easy-to-use, self-focusing, 12 megapixel digital camera, on Christmas Day, I had uploaded and relived the day’s memories before all the empty gift boxes had been placed in the recycling bin. And, before I closed my eyes for sleep that night, I knew what cute pajamas everyone had worn to bed Christmas Eve and whose ham had the best glaze. It used to take a week or more to finish a role of film, take it to the store, get it developed and get the finished 4 x 6 prints back. I miss that.
Getting the pictures back extended the holiday. The wait for them to come back was almost as fun as anticipating Christmas. As I looked over everyone else’s Christmas pictures on Facebook, I realized a second casualty of technology. There are people who will never, ever again have a bad picture. They take a picture, review it immediately, and decide instantly whether they’ll keep it. They choose which of the keepers to post, and the rest of the world will never know that they didn’t really sleep in those pajamas or that their hair didn’t look perfect while they were opening Santa’s gifts. They just delete the bad ones.
The sad thing is that this business of deleting the so-called pictures is creating a false idea of what life is like. When you look back on years past and all you see are perfect smiles, perfect hair, matching clothes and happiness, you have no frame of reference for the days when things aren't perfect. Your kids won’t remember the Christmas when everything went to Hades, and, when they are adults, they’ll wonder why they’re such failures at creating holiday memories. One of my buddies says one of his favorite pictures is one of his whole family with one particular son making a ridiculous face in the midst of everyone else’s smiles. Today, that photo would have been deleted. Thankfully, it wasn't. Now, his family pulls it out every year and gets a good laugh. It is, he says, the perfect picture to capture his son’s personality. They wouldn’t trade it for the world, he said.
I witnessed the worst loss to technology the day after Christmas. I was walking the dog around the block and saw three little girls outside. Last year, those little girls were giggling and playing on their new scooters. They raced, took turns, made figure 8s, screamed and laughed. This year, each was walking in a circle, silent, earphones in place and eyes down. One of the little girls almost walked in to me. This year, Santa brought iPods. This year, playing together means standing near each other, listening to different songs on private earphones or playing on-line games with some kid they don’t even know. No laughter. No giggling. No interaction.
Technology has its place. I love my smart phone. I’m writing this on my lap top. My new iPod lets me customize my music to my workout. But, I’m afraid hi-tech living is robbing our kids of perspective. Just today my son complained about the holiday movies my wife and I watched in November and December. “Y’all don’t do anything fun. You spend too much time watching TV,” he said. And what did he do while we enjoyed Christmas Vacation? He was watching YouTube.
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