The Hologram Is Ten Years Off. The Questions to Ask Your Family at Christmas Dinner Are Not.

On 30 August 2026, EL MUNDO published a two-page interview with me in its PAPEL supplement, written by Ricardo F. Colmenero. The headline, translated: in five to eight years you will talk to the hologram of a deceased relative at the Christmas table. What I said was 10 to 15 years, a forecast about adoption rather than projectors, with a line the headline had no room for: «No querrías tenerlo todos los días» (EL MUNDO, 30 August 2026). You would not want it every day.

Half the replies wanted a grandmother's voice back and half saw a horror film, and both skipped the same step. A hologram of a person is a display for a recording, and the recording has to be made while the person is alive. Whatever sits in a chair at Christmas in 2040 will be built from answers somebody gave in 2026, in their own voice, with their own consent. Displays get solved on schedule. The corpus does not. The hologram at the Christmas table covers that machinery; this page covers the table you will sit at in four months.

My father died suddenly in late 2024, a few months after a cancer diagnosis. There are things I would ask him at this table if I could. No projector fixes that.

The hologram is a forecast. The grandmother is a fact.

Ask your grandparents about the things only they witnessed: the house they grew up in, the day they met, the year that nearly broke them, what their own mother cooked. Those answers are held by nobody else at the table, and they leave with the person.

The answers matter beyond the meal. At Emory University, Robyn Fivush and Marshall Duke built a scale to measure how much children know about their family histories, and found that children in families telling more coherent family narratives had better self-esteem, better friendships and less anxiety (Emory News, April 2020). That measured knowing the stories, not asking for them, so treat the finding as a reason and not a guarantee.

Twelve questions for the grandparents. Pick two.

1. What did the house you grew up in smell like in the morning?

2. How did you and Grandpa meet, and who spoke first?

3. What was the first thing you ever bought with your own money?

4. Which Christmas do you remember best, and what went wrong at it?

5. What did your mother cook that nobody has made properly since?

6. What was the hardest year of your life, and what got you through it?

7. Who was the funniest person in your family, and what did they do?

8. What was my mother like at my age?

9. What did you want to be at fifteen?

10. What piece of advice from your father turned out to be right?

11. What have you never told anyone at this table?

12. What do you want us to keep doing after you die?

Question twelve belongs at the table; grandparents are usually readier for it than their children are. How to interview your grandparents is the longer sitting.

Ask the twelfth question first if you only get one.

Good Christmas dinner questions are addressed to one person, ask for a scene rather than an opinion, and can be answered in under two minutes by someone holding a fork. Forty-eight more follow, grouped by who is sitting where.

For the parents. Never yet asked any of these.

1. What were you doing the day before I was born?

2. How did you choose my name, and what name did you reject?

3. What did your first job pay, and what did you spend the first pay on?

4. What did you think of each other the first time you met?

5. What was the worst decision you made in your twenties?

6. What was I like at four?

7. Which of your parents' rules did you keep, and which did you drop on purpose?

8. What was the best day of your working life?

9. What did you nearly do instead of the life you had?

10. When were you most frightened for me?

11. What do you wish your own parents had told you?

12. Which of us is most like you, and where does it show?

For the siblings. Same house, different memory.

1. What is the earliest memory you have of me?

2. What did you get away with that I got blamed for?

3. Which family story do you tell differently from the way I tell it?

4. What were you afraid of in that house?

5. What did you think I would become?

6. Which of our mother's sayings do you catch yourself using?

7. What did you never tell me about school?

8. What did our parents get right?

9. When did you first feel like an adult?

10. What do you want your children to know about mine?

For the children. The least practice at being asked a real question.

1. What happened at school this year that you did not tell us?

2. Which rule in this house is unfair, and what would you replace it with?

3. What do you think Grandma was like when she was your age?

4. Which grown-up at this table would you take on an adventure, and where?

5. What are you good at that we have not noticed?

6. What do you want to remember about this Christmas when you are old?

7. Who in this family do you want to be like?

8. What question do you want to ask someone here and have never asked?

For the in-law who feels like a guest. Years of family stories without a speaking part.

1. What was Christmas like in the house you grew up in?

2. What did your family eat on this day that we have never heard of?

3. What surprised you most about this family the first year?

4. What is a tradition of yours we should steal?

5. What did your parents say when you told them about us?

6. What is your family's version of the story we keep telling?

7. Who do you miss at this table today?

8. What do you know how to make that nobody here can?

For the person who is grieving. The instinct is to protect them by never saying the name; most grieving people say the silence hurts more. Ask once, gently, and let them decline.

1. What would they have said about this meal?

2. What is the story of theirs you are afraid we will forget?

3. Which of their jokes still lands?

4. What did they always bring, and should we bring it next year?

5. What did they teach you that you use every week?

6. What were they like at Christmas when you were small?

7. Is there something of theirs you would like one of us to have?

8. What did you two argue about, and who was right?

9. When we mention them, what should we say, and what should we skip?

10. If you could ask them one more thing, what would it be?

That last question reaches my inbox every January. The longer list is questions to ask your parents before they die.

Sixty questions, one afternoon. Two will get asked. Two is enough.

Run them one per course, out loud, asked by the youngest person who can read, and do not correct the answer. Anything more elaborate turns the meal into a workshop.

One question per course means four or five across an afternoon: first drink, starter, main, dessert, tea. Write them on a card before the day, name who each is for, and hand the card to the youngest. A seven-year-old asking her grandfather what he wanted to be at fifteen gets an answer a forty-year-old would not, because a child cannot be suspected of an agenda.

No phones, except one, face down in the middle of the table, recording. Say out loud that the recording is happening and who is keeping the file.

Let silence sit. The first answer to a real question is the rehearsed one. The second arrives about eight seconds after everyone stops filling the gap, and the second is the one you came for. Hosts are the worst at this.

There is a national precedent. The Great Thanksgiving Listen is a StoryCorps initiative, launched in 2015, that asks people to record an interview with an elder, mentor or friend over the holiday using StoryCorps' free app, and those interviews become part of the StoryCorps Archive at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress (StoryCorps, The Great Thanksgiving Listen). StoryCorps says hundreds of thousands have taken part, with a phone, a partner and a quiet room.

One question, one course, one child holding the card.

Start building your legacy Free build, 50 memories, no card required.

Questions that ask for a scene open a story, and questions that ask for a fact, a feeling or a verdict close one. A closed question is one that can be answered with a yes, a no, a date or a number. An open question is one that cannot be answered without describing a room.

"Were you happy as a child" gets "mostly". "What did you do on a Saturday when you were ten" gets a bicycle, a brother, a creek, and somewhere in the middle of that the happiness or the lack of it, unasked and therefore true. Feelings close, objects open.

StoryCorps publishes its own list of Great Questions, and the pattern holds: "What is your earliest memory?", "How did you and grandma/grandpa meet?" (StoryCorps, Great Questions). Each asks for a moment, not a rating.

Ask for the room, and the feeling walks in behind.

Keep them first as an audio file made at the table, moved off that phone within the week, then in a form that survives the phone and the person who made the recording. A voice memo is a recording that lives on one device until somebody moves it, and most never move.

Start the recorder before the first question and let it run through the course, because the good answers arrive between questions. Name the file that night with the date and the names, "2026-12-25 Grandma Rose and Dad". Send the file to two other people before New Year. A recording on one phone is one dropped phone from gone.

How to record your life story covers the longer sittings a single Christmas cannot hold, and the best app to record grandparents' stories compares the tools by what happens to the file when the company or the phone dies, the only comparison that matters.

The honest limit of every option in that list: a recording plays the same way every time. Your grandmother, asked twice, gives two answers, and the second is often the truer. A file keeps one.

Move the file off the phone before the tree comes down.

Yes, a little, and some families will hate it. The objection is fair. A card of questions is a structure imposed on a meal that was supposed to have none.

A question asked badly, at the wrong moment, can close a table for the day. The grandmother may say "I don't remember" to a question she remembers perfectly, because she has decided the table is not the place, and she is allowed. One question per course, and the youngest asks, fixes most of this. A child's question does not read as an interview. A card in a grown-up's hand does.

Then the turn. The alternative is the same loud table, the same quiet grandmother, and one fewer year.

A Persona is a living likeness that a person builds from their own memories, voice and answers, while alive and with their consent, for the people they love. The memories a Persona is built from are the answers on this page: how she met him, what the house smelled like, what went wrong the Christmas she remembers best. Nobody can build that corpus for her after she has died, and my company will not try, because the consent has to be hers, given while she is alive. Executor Lock™ is the process that seals a Persona as a perfect snapshot at verified death, nothing added, no retraining, no drift, so what her grandchildren hear in twenty years is what she said, not what a model inferred (how Executor Lock works).

What your grandmother says into the phone this Christmas is the beginning of whatever your family might one day want to hear from her again. If she chooses to keep going, in her own words, the free build is 50 memories, no card, and never expires, and a Christmas gift for grandparents covers how to give her that without making the day about death. The person recorded is the person deciding. Everything else in this industry is somebody else's guess dressed as a grandmother.

The hologram, if it ever sits at your table, will be made of Christmases like this one. Most families will never want the hologram. Every family wants the answers.

The table is here. Ask her something.

What are good questions to ask family at Christmas dinner?

Good questions are addressed to one person, ask for a scene, and can be answered in under two minutes. Ask your grandmother what the house she grew up in smelled like. Ask your father what his first job paid. Ask your sister which family story she tells differently. Ask the child what nobody has noticed they are good at. Avoid anything answerable with a yes, a date or a rating.

How do you start a conversation at Christmas dinner without it being awkward?

Hand the question to the youngest person who can read. A seven-year-old asking her grandfather what he wanted to be at fifteen is not awkward; a forty-year-old with a notebook is. Write four or five questions on a card, one per course, each for a named person. Say out loud that the phone on the table is recording. Then stop filling the silence; the real answer arrives about eight seconds after the rehearsed one.

What is a good Christmas questions game for the whole family?

The simplest one works: a card of questions, one per course, the youngest asks, the answer goes to whoever the question names, and nobody may correct the story. For more structure, put every question on a folded slip in a bowl and let each person draw one for someone else. Keep the slips for the grieving person separate so nobody draws one by accident. No scoring, no timer, no phones except the one recording.

What if someone at the table is grieving this Christmas?

Ask them, once, gently, and let them decline. Protecting a grieving person by never saying the name usually hurts more than the name does. Good questions are about the person who died, not the grief: what would he have said about this meal, which of his jokes still lands. If they leave the table, let them go. If you are the one grieving, skip every question here, and our grief support page is there if you want a person rather than a list.

Can I use these answers to build an AI of my grandmother?

Not for her, and not after she has died. Afterlife AI does not recreate anyone who did not consent while alive, and a phone recording from Christmas dinner is not consent. What the recording can do is start something she builds herself: the free build is 50 memories, no card, never expires, and she decides who may ever hear the result. At verified death, Executor Lock seals what she made, with nothing added.

• The hologram at the Christmas table: what the EL MUNDO headline compressed, and what has to exist first.

• Questions to ask your parents before they die: the longer list, for the one who keeps putting it off.

• How to interview your grandparents: the full method, once Christmas has opened the door.

• How to talk to your family about death: for when question twelve needs a second conversation.

• Grandma, tell me your story book: the fill-in book on the table this year, its prices, and the question a page cannot ask.

• A digital legacy gift: the Christmas present that is being asked, for the person who has everything.

• An AI version of my parents: what the questions add up to when your parents answer them in their own voice.

• EL MUNDO, Chris Williams, CEO de Afterlife: "En cinco u ocho años podrás hablar con el holograma de un familiar fallecido en la mesa de Navidad", interview by Ricardo F. Colmenero, PAPEL supplement, 30 August 2026.

• Emory News, How family stories help children weather hard times, April 2020.

• StoryCorps, The Great Thanksgiving Listen, program page, checked 5 September 2026.

• StoryCorps, Great Questions, checked 5 September 2026.

Chris Williams is the founder and CEO of Afterlife AI (Idy Pty Ltd, Sydney) and the architect of Executor Lock, the process that seals a Persona at verified death. He is a father of four. He has been interviewed on consent-first digital legacy by EL MUNDO, Channel 10 News, The Daily Telegraph and ABC radio. Before Afterlife AI he founded Natural Solar, an Australian solar energy company. He writes here as a founder thinking in public, not as a grief professional.