Editor’s Note: The Tom’s Hardware staff first published a version of this poem in 2014 on Christmas Eve. It was updated a little bit and published again each year at the same time. The poem was given a complete overhaul in 2018 and has been rewritten with new stories and references every year since. (Also see the versions from 2019, 2020, and 2021.) The 2022 version is below.
Thank you all for the support and participation you offered in 2022, and we wish you Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year.
'Twas the holiday time and the question was such:
Why do components all cost so damn much?
But if Santa doesn't buy gifts off the shelf,
He makes them himself with the help of an elf.
And this wasn't the holiday season to tip-toe!
(it was only winter for miners and crypto.)
So many of Santa's finest regards
Would finally come packaged with graphics cards.
So he ate some fried chicken in his gaming chair,
And readied all of the builds in his lair.
Santa then climbed to the North Pole's steeple
And said, "time to get components to the people!"
Santa's nice list was on a hard drive
That he hadn't updated since 2005.
This led to some unexpected frustration
When Santa played his favorite song, "Rhythm Nation."
That Janet Jackson hit crashed his PC
And Santa snapped back to reality.
He'd need a new list and to check it all twice
With cutting-edge tech that was super precise.
He built PCs with Intel's 13th Gen Core
And Ryzen 7000 with power galore.
AMD and Nvidia GPUs fit
In motherboards piled up by his toolkit.
But just when he thought he had everything stable,
Santa melted a 16-pin power cable.
But he didn't have time for an RMA.
Maybe he should just quit, like EVGA.
It all seemed like some sort of practical joke,
But then Santa's UPS went up in smoke.
If this was some test of Santa's resolve,
It was a problem he was willing to solve.
He plugged in all of the rigs that his outlets allowed
But he also needed some help from the cloud.
The most expensive computing that money could buy
Could calculate trillions of digits of Pi.
He also had laptops hooked up in his lair,
Like the latest M2-powered MacBook Air.
Transferring this data wouldn't be free,
But the North Pole had its own ISP.
The silicon combed through everyone's deeds,
And everyone's wants, and everyone's needs.
Of who had been naughty and who had been nice,
In a big .csv — it wasn't concise.
"Computers saved me again," Santa thought,
"From the destruction 'Rhythm Nation' hath wrought."
He put the data onto an SSD en masse,
And for a backup, he stored it in glass.
The need for some backups had never been clearer,
But now Santa could leave this in the rear-view mirror.
He readied by squeezing his suit over his paunch.
This was one holiday he couldn't unlaunch.
No matter what you’re celebrating this year,
Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or Christmas with cheer;
We at Tom’s Hardware wish you the best …
We’ll be at our benches, running our tests.
