Christmas is a time for tradition. Finding the Christmas lights in the dark recesses of a cupboard and hanging much-loved baubles on the Christmas Tree. Running this xkcd cartoon has become a part of  I Programmer Christmas. Merry Christmas to all our readers.

'Tis that time of year when it is OK to use the word 'tis. Programmers are a funny lot, keen and eager to program, but they too are forced to stand away from the keyboard and stop coding. Why exactly? Well there are festive treats to open and consume and Xmas is a CS problem in its own right.

And more realistically, the family would disown them if they coded through the 25th. Set free from the lexicographic abstraction, who could blame a programmer's mind from wondering about the essentially programming nature of the holiday:

More cartoon fun at xkcd a webcomic of romance,sarcasm, math, and language

Then there is the question of how exactly do the elves solve the travelling santa problem, or TSP? Presumably they have a cloud computer running for most of the year or maybe santa has cracked quantum computing. If so I would like it on my xmas list.

The TSP is just one of the many difficult, if not NP Hard, problems that are embedded in the core of xmas.

The present assignment problem is closely related to the knapsack problem and then there is the Christmas cake cutting problem...

When you start looking CS is everywhere in xmas.

Of course this is just part of the story - because CS is just everywhere and not just at xmas. If Billy had been better trained in programming and computer science he would at least know the cost of removing the root present. How many other tragedies could be avoided if we just insisted that algorithms were a part of life and a part of the school curriculum.

And when it's all over we can start the GC algorithm and hope it defrags the house in O(1).

Happy programming year.

• Mike James is the author of The Programmer’s Guide To Theory which sets out to present the fundamental ideas of computer science in an informal, and yet informative, way and The Trick Of The Mind: Programming and Computational Thought, aimed at programmers and non-programmers alike, which examines the nature of programming and reveals why it is a very special skill.

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