christmas: the seasonal command
CHRISTMAS(8)

NAME
christmas, xmas, season2bjolly - Systems administration tool.

SYNOPSIS
    christmas [--jinglebells] [--happy] [--merry] [--happy-new-year] [--glad-tidings] [--cheer] [--office-party]

DESCRIPTION
This manual page documents the dedicated systems administration period known as `christmas'. This is a series of times spanning 86400 seconds. The next period of christmas is due to take place 851472000 seconds after Epoch. In this period all non-privileged users accounts remain unused in order that the systems' administrator can perform vital administration tasks. During this period the administrator has the opportunity to utilize the machine to its full capacity since the christmas command places the machine in single user mode.

--jinglebells - With this switch specified all monitors will have pieces of tinsel around them. Overnight, one strand of tinsel will get into the fan of a Sparc 10, and the machine will overheat, and need replacing. This means that during the christmas period it is essential that the machines are not left unattended at any time of night or day by the system administrator.

--happy - This is a dangerous state which users can enter during the use of christmas. It entails users doing recklessly stupid things and calling it just a bit of fun.

--merry - As

--happy, but more dangerous. Often associated with a substance known as ethanol (not all that dissimilar from isopropanol, the well known monitor cleaning agent), which disrupts the scheduler in many people, initially increasing their niceness, but with an excessively large stream, causes an extreme negative niceness.

--happy-new-year - This is a greeting used by people to signify their recognition that tm_year in struct tm as defined in time.h is about to increase.

--glad-tidings - This switch causes your inbox to be full of e-mails devoid of content wishing glad tidings. A common reaction to receipt of such junk-mail is to decrease the cpu-limit of the user in question.

--cheer - Obsolete.

--office-party - A period when the scanner is used excessively for unconventional purposes, and the WWW firewall log gets full of outgoing requests to www.playboy.com. It may be difficult to login from console during this period.

RETURNS
With a stonking great hangover.

BUGS
Some systems administrators have made the misfortune of connecting themselves to another human. These administrators may have problems using the christmas administration tool for the above purpose as other people in the cluster may wish to use the period for cluster integration purposes, and performing IPC for extended periods of time.