Is it Christmas today?

Thanks to a few lines of CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, and JavaScript, both clocks at the company manage to detect day and night and change their background and text colors. From six in the morning until six in the evening, they show black text on a white background; at other times, the reverse. For Min Guhong Manufacturing, it is enough for a clock to show whether it is day or night, rather than the exact time or its passage: whether one should be sitting at the office computer, or can walk along the Gyeongui Line Forest Park in Yeonnam-dong amid the cherry blossoms, even with a mask on.

There is one more clock, for a particular day: “Is it Christmas today?” It gives a clear answer to anyone suddenly struck by the question, but is likely to be useless on Christmas Day itself—except, of course, to customers who must sit at a computer even on Christmas. “The product, taking the form of a website, determines whether today is Christmas and tells the customer. As a result, the phrase the customer usually encounters is ‘No!’ That is all. It is either this or that, never both at once. Is it Christmas today, or not? Is the manuscript completed, or not? Are the products mass-produced in factories in China and Vietnam, or not?” (Jung Jidon, thisisneverthisisneverthat, Workroom Press, 2020.)