--- title: December Global Festivities Marked by Google Doodle description: Google is celebrating the December Global Festivities with a new interactive Doodle series about birds visiting family for the holidays. canonical: https://time.com/5068291/december-global-festivities-google-doodle/ author: Eli Meixler article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2017-12-18T02:51:09.000Z article:modified_time: 2023-12-12T23:30:47.000Z og:title: December Global Festivities Marked by Google Doodle og:description: The new series features a pair of penguins visiting tropical-weather family og:url: https://time.com/5068291/december-global-festivities-google-doodle/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt4115f2768eaa8184/6988f67f22fb8513dce24385/screen-shot-2017-12-25-at-10-11-41-am.png?branch=production&width=368&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 368 og:image:height: 207 og:image:alt: Screen Shot 2017-12-25 at 10.11.41 AM og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: December Global Festivities Marked by Google Doodle twitter:description: The new series features a pair of penguins visiting tropical-weather family twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt4115f2768eaa8184/6988f67f22fb8513dce24385/screen-shot-2017-12-25-at-10-11-41-am.png?branch=production&width=368&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # December Global Festivities Are Being Celebrated by Google With a Seasonal Doodle > Sponsored content. 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Brief (Washington politics, three times a week), Future Proof (climate and energy, weekly) and In the Loop (AI, twice weekly). All are free at time.com/newsletters and together reach more than 1.1 million engaged readers. #### Which TIME newsletter should I subscribe to? It depends on what you follow. For a daily briefing, The Brief. For health, Health Matters. For Washington politics, D.C. Brief. For AI and technology, In the Loop. For climate and energy as a business story, Future Proof. For culture recommendations, Worth Your Time. For how TIME's journalism gets made, Inside TIME. Readers can select any combination at time.com/newsletters. #### Are TIME's newsletters free? Yes. All seven TIME newsletters are free to join at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and provides full access to TIME's journalism at time.com/subscribe-agent. #### Who writes TIME's newsletters? TIME journalists write them. Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ## Video: How Google Makes its Doodles [Watch (HLS stream): How Google Makes its Doodles](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/upF0qp1E.m3u8) (3:23)  _Published 2018-07-07. Our videographer went to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California to meet some of the designers and coders who create the special, clever variations on the Google.com logo known as_ by [Eli Meixler](https://time.com/author/eli/) ## Eli Meixler Updated: Dec 12, 2023 11:30 PM UTCPublished: Dec 18, 2017 2:51 AM UTC  Google Doodle by [Eli Meixler](https://time.com/author/eli/) ## Eli Meixler Updated: Dec 12, 2023 11:30 PM UTCPublished: Dec 18, 2017 2:51 AM UTC Google on Christmas Day continued its[ series of festive, interactive holiday Doodles](https://www.google.com/doodles/holidays-2017-day-1) with a heartwarming family reunion. The seasonal Google Doodle series is all about two penguins, a “pair of slippery-footed siblings,” who are “excited to spend time with their warm-weather relatives,” a toucan and a parrot, [according to Google](https://www.google.com/doodles/holidays-2017-day-1). The first installment in the December global festivities series, published Dec. 18, showed the penguins inside their icy igloo, making plans with their tropical relatives and packing their bags for a holiday.  Google Doodle The Christmas Day update shows the penguins happily running toward their toucan and parrot friends, gifts in hand. In a later frame, “this colorfully feathered family can’t wait to sink their beaks into a delicious feast” as they gather around a tropical holiday table, [Google writes.](https://www.google.com/doodles/holidays-2017-day-2) (Don’t worry, there’s no turkey to be found.) The Doodle’s final panel includes a past photo of the reunited family, as well as a pile of wrapped gifts that hint at the series’ next installments — Dec. 31, New Year’s Eve, and finally, Jan. 1, New Year’s Day — that will pick up the penguins’ adventures as they ring in 2018. **Correction:** The original version of this story misstated the direction penguins would travel to reach tropical climates. They would likely travel north, not south. ## Transcript >> The Doodle team was able to meet Ira Glass from This American Life, and he was just meeting us for fun. I guess, I'm not even sure why he was here, but we talked about potentially collaborating and they thought that it'd be fun to collaborate with us on Valentine's Day, so I took the lead on this project. >> We do Valentine's Day pretty much every year, and we've done your typical like lovebirds and, you know, flowers and things like that. But Ira and his team are awesome. >> They were able to pull stories that they have collected over the years, they've recorded new stories for us, and they're all about love in all different respects of the word. They sent us maybe 8 or 10 stories and they're all really fun and really sweet. >> The stories run the [ unk ]. There is a story about middle school love. >> I was in the cafeteria, just got on a drink of root beer and she walks up to me. >> There is a story about a new bride who's in doubt that she made a mistake. >> My husband, me and I, we're just so worried, his face I could tell. I said, " Where he could be ," you know, and I-- and I called the police because I thought he got lost or something happened. >> When I first got the audio from Ira, my co- worker and I listened to it together and we wrote down bullet points of where we wanted to have a little drawing come up. >> One of my favorite stories, it involves middle schoolers. We're titling it, " Puppy Love" so true to the title, I just-- I just drew everyone as a dog. >> Each stories are-- containing a little candy heart. >> And when you click on it, the heart will flip, the audio will play and you will also see the images that we've drawn to accompany the phrases. So, now we are all going to brainstorms together because we need the creative side and we also need the technical side to tell us what is possible and what isn't possible. For this one, it's a pretty conservative on the interactive side, because we didn't want to overshadow the audio. When I first started, they were no engineers on the team, we only did static doodles, but since then, we've started doing more animated stuff, more interactive work, and for that we needed a dedicated team. >> Some of our most like ambitious to those have come from engineers that are just incredibly talented and spare similar time for our projects. >> Sometimes the illustrators will come up with an idea that is way too wacky and just not possible yet. The technology hasn't been invented, but sometimes we're too conservative and it's great to have the engineers there to tell us that we can actually be way wackier with our ideas. The relationship with my engineer on this was to just keep my files size at a reasonable capacity, I was getting a little bit ambitious with how many frames I wanted to draw and my engineers said, " Hey, you need to double it ." >> We tried to do as many doodles as we possibly can. We're a pretty small team, relative to how many audiences are out there [ unk ], but yeah, we-- you never know what you're gonna get. 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