This week is Hanukkah and typically Google adds holiday decorations in the form of Jewish Stars, Menorahs, Dreidels or other Hanukkah related decorations. This year, Hanukkah began on Saturday night, December 8th but Google has no such Hanukkah decorations this year.

Instead, they have decorations for Festivus, just Google [festivus] and you will see the pole.

What is Festivus? It is a secular holiday that is celebrated on December 23rd and became popular during an episode of Seinfeld in 1997. It is to celebrate the holiday without all the commercial aspects of the holiday season. The holiday was created by the writer Dan O’Keefe and first celebrated by his family in 1996.

Since 2005, Google has always had special decorations for the holiday seasons. I don’t believe they ever left out a Hanukkah decoration set before but they have left out Festivus in the past.

Postscript: Google added the Hanukkah decorations about 24 hours after this post.

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: User Interface

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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