Google Doodle Begins Christmas, New Year Countdown With Interactive Illustrations

The festive season is here and the search engine giant Google has started its countdown for the Christmas celebrations in full swing. The company unveiled a doodle Monday, featuring three colourful, interactive slides that show two penguins and their parrot friends getting in the holiday spirit.

The first slide harks back to the old days of wired telephones, and shows a telephonic conversation between the penguins in the snow and the parrots in warmer regions. The second illustration shows other holiday elements, with one of the penguins packing luggage for upcoming travel and the other reading a holiday message on a postcard.

The third illustration expresses the mood that goes with the festive celebration, by showing all the friends in one frame — a perfect picture of celebrating festivity and displaying the essence of togetherness. Next to the photo frame are gift boxes marked with festive dates of December — 18, 25, and 31 — and Jan. 1, for Christian feast day, Christmas, New Year’s Eve and New Year, respectively.

In a description of the doodle, the Google Blog said, “The festive season is here and this pair of slippery-footed siblings are excited to spend time with their warm-weather relatives.”

The blog also announced there was more to come in this festive season and said, “Stay tuned over the next couple of weeks to see what kind of fun this feathery family has in store.”

This doodle could be seen across North America, South America, the United Kingdom, Australia, and certain parts of Asia and Africa.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, came up with the concept of doodle after they tried to decorate the company’s logo to mark their attendance at the Burning Man festival in 1998. They placed a stick figure drawing behind the second “o” in Google, and the revised logo was meant as a comical message for the search engine users, so they know both the founders were “out of office” that day.

Since then, the idea of commemorating notable events has become common with the company. Initially the doodles mostly celebrated familiar holidays but with positive response from users, who liked the change in the logo and appreciated the information provided, Google now uses the doodle to mark an array of birth anniversaries of famous personalities, news events, festivals, and inventions.