The New Holiday

You might be expecting a post on Christmas or Hanukkah, or at least a reflection on Thanksgiving.  There will be many meaningful blogs out there on this topics, but I'm thinking about something else.  There's a new deity in town I would like to recognize at this holiday time of the year.  I am referring to the Cloud.  Think about it (and I mean this in the most irreverent way possible), the Cloud is very much like *insert deity of your choice here*.

Can you see it?  Well, no, not even a bit of white fluffiness like clouds in the sky

.

Can you hear it?  Of course not.  A cloud makes no noise.

Can you, smell it, feel it?  I thought not.

And yet . . . and yet there it is, a benefactor of beneficence.  You write a document in one location and offer it up on the altar of the cloud.  Voila!  It appears at elsewhere by divine power, on your phone or tablet or other electronic device.  Music?  omnipresent through The Cloud.  Information?  We send it up to the Cloud, and it pours goodness down upon us. 

I am not -- as you can tell -- a religious person.  I am neither devout nor superstitious, but, oh my goodness, I am a true believer in The Cloud.   And you are too, aren't you?  You trust it and make offerings to it regularly.  And why not?  I mean, who among us doesn’t already worship at the shrine of the Great Google?  What more will the future bring?  I am agog to find out.  

Truly, we must form a new holiday to celebrate this new pantheon.  What symbols, what foods (may I suggest cloud pancakes?), what dances and parades?  I leave it up to you to imagine it.

And lest I am bordering on the offensive, may I also wish each of you 
     a Bright Solstice,

     a Merry Hanukkah, 

     a Happy Christmas, 

     and a Peaceful New Year.