Christmas Robin Clock

To enhance your enjoyment of the Christmas season to previously unattainable levels, it's now possible to purchase exclusively from BorgCo one of our beautiful Christmas Robin Clocks.

Resembling a larger version of the traditional cuckoo clock, the Christmas Robin Clock has a slightly different dial, with four hands. In place of the usual twelve divisions, there are twenty-four. The longest, thinnest hand is a sweep second-hand; the next longest is the minute hand, which performs one complete revolution every hour. There is a shorter, thicker hour hand, which makes one complete circle every day; and there is the day hand, which has a loop on the end which encircles the digits and jumps forward one division every twenty-four hours.

The clock is wound up and set going at 00:00:00 on 1 December. Every hour, on the hour, it "performs". Inside the case is an incredibly sophisticated, high-quality digital music storage system with 5.1 Dolby surround-sound capability, pre-programmed with an enormous range of festive music of every possible era and genre. Unfortunately, due to an oversight, it isn't actually connected to anything, and the clock's sounds come from a PIC16 microcontroller driving a 20mm piezo sounder through a badly-designed output stage, ensuring that the resultant noise, though painfully loud (there is no volume control or off switch, although some purchasers recommend the acquisition of a large hammer at the same time as the clock) is tinny, of limited frequency response, and severely distorted in both phase and tone. So every sixty minutes, for twenty-four days, the Christmas Robin pops out from behind its little wooden doors and delivers an appropriate amount of unpleasantly-loud, synthetic, unconvincing chirruping and twittering. The DeLuxe version has a twirling snowman, Santa and his reindeer, elves, a Christmas tree, and a baby Jesus in a crib that process along a little track mounted below the clock face.

At midnight on 24 December, much to everyone's relief, the clock explodes.