We don't do holiday projects

It's tempting to create holiday-themed projects for the Boldport Club. People suggest that to me quite often. I've decided not to do that; here's why.

Not everyone celebrates Christmas
Or Hanukkah or Ramadan or Pastover. Or any of the other shopping-motivated 'holidays' (I'm looking at you, Valantine.) Not everyone lives in the northern hemisphere and associates Spruce or Fir trees with Christmas. My southern-Brazilian friends associate Christmas with beaches and camarão, for example. We have members from all over the world; why would I presume?

Meh
Everyone is doing it, so I'm generally not interested. It's easy, it's obvious, and it's been done. I feel the same about NeoPixels, by the way.

Stock
We start planning projects four to six months in advance. We order the production boards (ideally) 90 days ahead of shipping, so we need to nail down the amount we'll build then. We create a fixed amount of stock for each project and won't make more. Normally we try to project how many members we'll have by the time we ship plus about, say, 100. (We used to do a lot more, but then we got stuck with a lot of stock to shift. Anyway.) This means that whatever date-specific project we don't ship, no one would want until next year. That's no good.

Logistics
The realities of shipping world-wide is that it can take up to a month to get to someone — we've had much longer! So if we want to hit a specific date we'd need to ship the project at least a month before, possibly two depending on the date of the holiday. Some people will receive it way too early and some won't receive it in time. People would want, justifiebly, to swap projects. All that kind of sucks.

Part of the intended appeal of our projects — whether obvious or not — is that they are 'timeless'. I don't mean this in a pompous kind of way. Our projects will be as enjoyable in five or ten years as they are today. TAP, MOSTAP, and the upcoming Widlar are based on circuits that are 40-50 years old! You cannot say that about a Raspberry Pi or Arduino you buy today and use years later, twenty generations behind, stale and inadequate.

So now you know :)