Every year at Softeq, we enjoy coming up with a unique Christmas gift for our clients. Given that innovation is one of our core cultural company values, it can’t be something standard or off the shelf. We can’t just send a flat 2D Christmas card...so for the past 29 years, the Softeq Christmas card has been a 3D pop-up card. This year’s 3D card is a tree farm, which is nostalgic for me because we'd take our five kids there every year, walk the acres of trees, and choose the perfect tree to take home.

Our 2025 3D Christmas Card

Our Christmas gift is an opportunity for me to get a little creative, dabble in some artwork (using AI nowadays, of course), write some poetry for the card in the box (original, no AI), and sometimes do some programming. This year, I created the poem artwork using the AI tool Midjourney. Simply amazing what you can do now with AI. Over the year, I've also made use of Grok, Perplexity, and ChatGPT, with various results when it comes to images.

I enjoy giving myself a new challenge when I write poems, and this year I decided to use an ABBA rhyming scheme.

A fun fact...the card is 3.5" x 3.5", which is the exact size of a 3.5" floppy disk. 💾 If you've been in the industry as long as I have, you've used your share of floppies. A whole 1.44Mb of information in your pocket! Not even enough to store a photo nowadays. If you weren't around back then, you know it as the "Save" icon in most programs. 😆

A collection of some of our past Softeq Christmas Gifts

I love gadgets and puzzles, and for inspiration, we start by looking at whatever new gadgets I’ve added to my desktop collection over the past year. We also think back to the ideas we had in previous years that were runners-up and perhaps make better sense this year, either due to cost, timing, or theme.

Whatever the gift, it must reflect Softeq's brand and values in some way. For example, our cribbage board couldn’t just have a standard set of cards. Ours had to include programming and executable code in 13 languages, including an obfuscated programming language called Befunge. Learn more about the inspiration behind our cribbage board and card deck, including Befunge.

In 2022, we gave a Kalimba, also known as a Thumb Piano. Why? When IBM was hiring programmers in the early days of computers (the 1960s), almost no one was trained in computer programming. There were no Computer Science majors in those days, so IBM hired musicians and trained them to code, because they already understood the abstract nature of encoding data into something that could be "played."I love to hire for aptitude more than experience, and more companies should still be doing that today. Learn more about the Kalimba and inspiration behind it.

My desk is the inspiration for many of our gifts

Two years ago, we gave out the Shashibo Cube, partly inspired by my love of geometry and fond memories of my 3rd-grade teacher, Mr. Brilliant (yes, his actual name). Learn more about the Shashibo Cube and the inspiration behind it.

Chris with his teacher Mr. Brilliant

Our long-term clients now look forward to this gift each year and even collect them. Some keep them on their desks as a desktop gadget, and others bring them home to their kids. Adults and kids alike should get at least one fun toy for Christmas! If it brings a smile to someone’s face, we’ve succeeded.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

-- Arthur C. Clarke

I've always loved this quote, which matched last year's gift of Magic Mind Reader Cards...while not advanced technology themselves, they are still based on the very essence of technology, which is binary, the language of computers. Read more about how the cards work and how they highlighted our values of Trust, Empathy, Commitment, Collaboration, and Empathy.

This year our gift is the Kanoodle Extreme, containing 303 brain-busting 2-D and 3-D puzzles. Solving puzzles helps reinforce existing connections between our brain cells. It also increases the generation of new relationships. This, in turn, improves mental speed and thought processes. Puzzles are especially good for improving short-term memory, which helps us remember shapes and colors and visualize the bigger picture to figure out which pieces will fit together.

Another benefit of puzzles is that they increase our brains' production of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that regulates mood and feelings of optimism. It also affects memory, concentration, and motivation. Dopamine is released every time we successfully solve a puzzle — or even just get one piece in the right place. This encourages us to continue working to solve them and to challenge ourselves.

At the same time that puzzles challenge us, they also help us to relax. Our brains also go from a "Beta," or wakeful, state to an "Alpha" state when we're solving puzzles. The Alpha state is similar to the state we're in when we're dreaming.

The Brain-Busting Kanoodle Extreme puzzle

We hope you enjoy playing Kanoodle – having fun while simultaneously reaping the benefits for brain health – and we wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas!