Twas The Night Before Tom's Christmas

[Editor’s Note: The Tom’s Hardware staff first published a version this poem in 2014 on Christmas Eve. We updated it a little bit and ran it again each year at the same time. While we have many new faces on staff this year, we wanted to carry on this tradition that we know brings joy to our readers, no matter what or how they celebrate. In that spirit, the poem has been given a complete overhaul to reflect events and tech from 2018. We thank you all for the support and participation you offer throughout the year, and we wish you Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year.]

‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through Tom’s home,

The computers were off, using not an Ohm.

We turned off our games, our reviews and our code.

And shut lights like macOS Mojave’s dark mode.

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But there was a noise, from my bed I arose,

To see Rudolph with an RGB nose.

Santa changed his colors with a click and wink,

His sleigh works with Asus’ Aura Sync!

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We hid while Santa dropped off our gifts:

Laptops, processors and Oculus Rifts.

The house was silent, and that was when

We saw the CPUs were 14 nanometers again!

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We could’ve been mad and played present sheriff,

But gifts could’ve been pricey with all of the tariffs.

So we unwrapped the rest by the light of the yule,

Like Intel at Computex, we kept our cool.

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And some of these other gifts are kind of weighty,

There’s one ray-traced game on this new 2080!

GPUs for gaming? We’re back to basics.

They’re more fairly priced with mining on ASICs.

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Avram was gifted a Raspberry Pi,

And Matt got a hard drive that he’d never buy.

Scharon found a monitor and speakers from Sonos

While Andrew sat in an Acer Predator Thronos.

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Thomas’ X399 motherboard made him chipper,

It went perfectly with Paul’s new Threadripper.

Anj got a new black Surface Pro, ain’t it stunning?

She deserved that and more for keeping Tom’s running.

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There was almost a mix-up with European gifts.

But Santa wasn’t giving them the short shrift;

How could he know where those good people are,

With Europe’s privacy laws called GDPR?

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But we all know that Santa has his wiles.

And Windows 10’s updates didn’t delete his files.

So he booted up his sleigh’s sweet on-board PC

With a list for tech gifts for under every tree.

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Back at Tom’s, we wondered who got coal in their stocking.

Was it Elon Musk who couldn’t stop talking?

Or Mark Zuckerberg for Facebook’s security breaches?

Or Jeff Bezos, who isn’t sharing his riches?

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But we like to focus on positive things,

Like all the great stuff that the Future can bring.

What’s next year’s tech? Who can even guess?

So we booked flights to Las Vegas for CES.

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For a few hours we built new PCs with our swag,

Consulting the forums when we hit a snag.

Then we overclocked them and installed our apps,

And thanked our ISP for not imposing data caps.

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It got quite late and we needed to sleep,

We went to bed to start counting sheep.

All this excitement was surprisingly grueling,

So we slept by the sounds of fans and liquid cooling.

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And while we slept, and while we snoozed,

We dreamed of 7 nanometer CPUs,

And new innovations for 2019.

So much cool stuff could go in one machine.

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No matter what you’re celebrating this year,

Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or Christmas with cheer;

We at Tom’s Hardware wish you the best,

And we’ll be at our benches, running our tests.