The author of this text, Jarod Reyes, is sharing a holiday hack from Twilio's favorite hacker Will Dages. The hack involves building a "texting Christmas tree" that changes its lights when receiving different colored texts. This was inspired by the desire to control Christmas lights in a novel way and make it accessible to more people, as not everyone has a Twitter account. The hack uses Twilio's text messaging service to enable this functionality, allowing users to interact with the tree through their phones.