The 12 tweets of Christmas

1. Lo! A tradition is born. For the first Twitter Christmas, celebrants traded the scared ritual of trampling each other over tacky toys for the use of twitter for shopping bargains and logistics; for example, Mall of America tweeted customers that the only parking left was near IKEA.

2. Forget Aunt Clara's spattered recipe for pie, handed down like an heirloom with notations like "add half eggshell of water." Even the Butterball phone hot line is nearing its expiration date with many cooks going online. When my son brought a fresh Amish turkey in a watery gravy of cooler brine at Thanksgiving (we named it Caleb Yoder), he read instructions right from foodnetwork.com without printing a hard copy.

3. Salvation Army kettles might go plastic. The charity is testing the use of debit and credit cards, because fewer people use cash when they shop, thus reducing their spare change. Just as long as the ringers keep jingling real bells!

4. Remember "Planes, Trains & Automobiles?" Today John Candy and Steve Martin could put themselves out of their hilarious misery with "Tweets, Blogs & Facebooking." Recently a blog post about honeymooners who hit a snag enroute to paradise prompted supporters to flood the travel site Expedia. The lovebirds have been promised a refund.

5. Stumped for gifts? Technology has made it possible for you to give your darling daughter a light she can poke in her bellybutton. And if you suspect the heartthrob your BFF met online is an ax murderer, give her a Handy Truster ($37.95), a lie detector with 82 percent accuracy. (I know, it's the other 18 percent you're worried about.)

6. Holiday blockbuster movies are fading away like aging actresses because so many movie lovers are sacrificing the pleasures of the big screen for the convenience of home viewing. Recently one of my kids scandalized me by saying he hadn't seen a movie in a theater in two years.

7. Let's have a moment of silence for Black Friday. It's being reported that with more people shopping online, the once-fabled deals were less spectacular this year. For example, some electronic products offered were older models perched on the precipice of obsolescence, like navigation devices without speech capacity.

8. We may have to rename Cyber Monday, which anyway sounds like a horror movie in which Santa turns into a droid. This year, online sites jumped the gun to Cyber Sunday, with many now extending the usual post-Thanksgiving bargains into the last day in December that an order can still be shipped in time for the holidays.

9. Here we go a-site hopping. For example, if you want a new Wii game, instead of going directly to a retail site like Best Buy, you can enter through a shopping portal (which manages to sound both sci-fi and old-timey) such as FatWallet.com and possibly get a better deal -- cash back, extra rewards on your credit card, shipping discounts.

10. The Manhattan tradition of Sidewalk Santas -- that is, homeless men hired to gather donations in chimney-like boxes while shoppers rush home with their treasures along posh Fifth Avenue -- has gone online. The organization that runs the program doesn't have enough money to pay the poor fellas, which seems counterintuitive. What, were they demanding a 401(k) match? Charity begins on the sidewalk!

11. Beware of grinches. They're delivering fake invoices purported to be from UPS so they can steal your identity, the old liars. Some even "friend" you so that their malware can snitch your password.

12. Due to privacy concerns, the U.S. Postal Service had decided to quit sending Santa's answers to children's letters from its outpost in Anchorage this year, making spirits dark. Recently, the decision was reversed due to an outpouring of outraged nostalgia. Yes, Virginia, there really is a disgruntled Post Office employee!