Why the holidays warp our perception of time
Once a year there's about a week-long stretch when our measurement of time switches from minutes and hours into gingerbread cookies and binged TV episodes. Or maybe it's servings of leftover ham and the number of repeat listens to Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas," or hot cocoa and the amount of cries had at your fifth viewing of Little Women.
Whatever your personal unit for quantifying the progression of days into nights is over the holidays, what feels universal is how we're all collectively confronted by the idea that time — this seemingly objective fact that governs our reality — is actually just a social construct.
And its construction gets weirdly wobbly over the holidays.
You May Also Like
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Concepts like "Monday" and "Friday," which dictate our experiences every other week of the year, lose all meaning. Days of the month become generalized into either being closer to post-Christmas or pre-New Years Eve. The ritual of annual holidays forces us into mind-bending states of reflection and nostalgia, too, as we simultaneously feel closer to youth and more estranged from it than ever. Even our internal sense of age distorts, the responsibilities of adulthood replaced by the inherent regression of being with family or in the childhood home where mom's still doing your laundry.
Don't take my word for it, either. Psychologists and neuroscientists call this general phenomenon "mind time," describing the many ways subjectivity and social context shapes our sense of time.
"Time perception matters because it is the experience of time that roots us in our mental reality. Time is not only at the heart of the way we organize life, but the way we experience it," writes author Claudia Hammond in Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception.
The only reason we started pretending time could even be objectively measured in things like hours or days was for the sake of global commerce, anyway. So, as one of the only periods of the year when folks get extended breaks from school or work, the holidays provide a rare opportunity for us to experience time when it's not being quantified by the amount of labor we're contributing to social capital.
No one is going to answer your email. The Post Office is closed. You can't run any errands. The pressure to justify your existence by keeping busy or being productive is lifted for one brief, far-too-fleeting moment. For some, it's even more fleeting, with the respite lasting only the couple of days listed as federal holidays. But isn't that wild in itself — just two days off can mess with the chunk of time between Christmas and New Year's. Our passive rebellion against the tyranny of time, the holidays give us permission to laze about.
Our passive rebellion against the tyranny of time, the holidays give us permission to laze about in wool sweaters, do fuck all, and simply exist. Our sole responsibilities become eating, breathing, and shitting (maybe even in that order). That's the closest we'll ever come to a dog's experience of life, or a baby with a schedule that's entirely someone else's problem to worry about.
Which brings us back to the family factor, and returning to the mental state of being somewhere between an impetuous toddler and angry teen. On every other day of the year, you're an adult who votes, pays taxes, feeds your cat. During the time-collapse of the holidays, you stop being a grad student or career professional: No matter how old you are, you're still just someone's kid, grandkid, niece, or little sibling.
Still, not everyone sees family. But that doesn't mean you don't get caught up in a number of other holiday time vortexes.
Sometimes, it feels like last Christmas just happened. Other years, it's as if several lifetimes have passed in the 365 days since the last holiday. On Psychology Today Ronald E Riggio, a professor of organizational psychology at Claremont McKenna College, explains that this particular type of holiday time-warping happens because:
The first time we experience events (such as Christmas, or preparing taxes, or going to Disneyland), they make new, and very vivid memories. We reflect on those memories and that helps preserve them. As we repeat the same events again and again, they don't make much of an impression and we don't reflect much, so when it happens again the following year, it seems like it just happened.
Or maybe you don't go back home. Maybe you go on vacation during the holidays. But that too inspires its own type of time distortion. As Hammond, the author of Time Warped, writes:
During ordinary life, time appears to pass at a normal pace, and we use markers like the start of the workday, weekends, and bedtime to assess the rhythm of things. But once we go on vacation, the stimulation of new sights, sounds, and experiences injects a disproportionate amount of novelty that causes these two types of time to misalign. The result is a warped perception of time.
Whatever the specifics of your time-bending holiday experience is, take a moment (whatever a "moment" feels like) to appreciate its utter strangeness. Because the minute dawn breaks over Jan. 2, it's back to the oppressive yoke of experiencing time as usual.
Jess is an LA-based culture critic who covers intimacy in the digital age, from sex and relationship to weed and all media (tv, games, film, the web). Previously associate editor at Kill Screen, you can also find her words on Vice, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Vox, and others. She is a Brazilian-Swiss American immigrant with a love for all things weird and magical.
