Christmas maps

Since before I was born, my family has written a Christmas letter, the author rotating annually, and I unwittingly penned many of them as a child with my parents as ghost writers. 2011 marked the first year I actually wrote the one that bore my name, and in 2014 I went all out, adding charts of postcards sent and miles flown, as well as a color coded map indicating where each member of the family had traveled in the previous 12 months. I made it to the fewest states, but living abroad will do that to you.

Though the letter has changed, and the family grown, the map has remained, each year painstakingly crafted by me in a piece of software I almost never have cause to use for any other purpose. It has been a lot of work… until now.

Our family tracks our travel in a shared spreadsheet, and at the end of the year, I’d take that information and make the map. Recently, I asked Claude code to help. I outlined the situation, the inputs, the desired outputs, and a bit more context. Now I have a program that regenerates the map daily. Come next Christmas, I’ll spend moments on what used to take a lot of time.

This is my map for the current year. I’ve only included myself to protect the privacy of my family, so you don’t get to see the stripes, and I only update the spreadsheet after a trip is completed to protect myself, but outside of that, it’s always up to date.