Let's do the time warp again

Things move slowly this time of year. Christmas has long been a holiday that luxuriously stretches its arms and legs beyond the bounds of Dec. 25, seemingly because people can’t get enough of shiny ribbons and jolly snowmen who can somehow breathe through a carrot. For that reason, the days and nights that surround the holiday crawl languidly. Business grinds to a halt, and even a lot of the travel that takes place seems to have an unhurried quality, a slippers-and-hot-chocolate vibe that foreshadows deep rewards in warmly-lit living rooms and family dens. For the devout and the secular alike, it’s the time of year when we pause and take stock.

And it freaks me out.

Not in a bad way. I mean, it’s kinda nice, right? The sleepy pantomime of work, the welcome distraction of jangling silver bells and pudding-thick eggnog -- it’s nice, an old-timey bulwark against winter blues. Yet it’s so unnatural that this seven-to-12-day stretch is always disorienting, a time apart. It has the untethered quality of unexpected time off, with the added strangeness of reindeer with flashlights for noses. (A hallucinatory vision if ever there was one.)

My own particular theory as to why these days have such a specific aura: The warm reminiscences in which many of us indulge. Simply put, when your mind is moored to the past, the present can’t barrel forth with the same unrelenting velocity.

No observation, this one included, is universally applicable, of course. This theory works primarily when talking about those of us lucky enough to have fuzzy Christmases past on which to draw. People who lack this well of holiday cheer are likely more weirded out than I am, just biding their time until January, when relative normalcy resumes. I would like to offer these people a red-and-green sugar cookie and a cinnamon-infused craft beer. It’s not much, but it’s more feasible than my only other idea, which is to host a ’50s-style sock-hop in my living room. The space is too small, and besides, you can’t really dance to Anthrax.

If you’ve got a robust history of bustling yuletide bliss, though, then this out-of-time feeling you’re likely experiencing will be handy for inevitable trips down memory lane. Time folds in on itself during the last two weeks of December. We look back at the year that was and have our inevitable conversations: “I can’t believe so-and-so died! Remember in the spring when Aunt Margaret finally mastered the time-honored art of sword swallowing? And hey, I lost 10 pounds and can finally fit into that dress with the print pattern of burning pirate skulls!” These reflections feel like a way of solidifying experiences, of sealing them permanently in our own personal history books. It’s also a fun way to re-live some of the good times, like when you finally gathered up the courage to go sky-diving (and peed just a little during your jump).

At the same time, we tend to speculate on how the coming year will unfold, knowing our prognostications are probably wrong put peering intently into our crystal balls regardless. I’ll refrain from making forecasts about 2017 since I’m as bad at predicting this crap as anyone else, but I can guarantee you that the big shock-worthy moments and life-altering circumstances won’t be what we expect; they’ll come out of left field and gobsmack us, catch us unprepared. A lot of people are uneasy about what will transpire politically as the next few months unfold, but the top story of early 2017 will be something entirely random, like killer mutants taking over local government in Vancouver, or the Ku Klux Klan producing an off-Broadway musical about the history of turnip farming in western Europe.

Personally, Dec. 24 and 25 are the only days in which I find myself actually living in the moment. The fact that things grind to a halt during this period certainly helps in that regard. But even so, I can’t fully escape the weight of the past; it’s as though each Christmas is superimposed on top of all the others, a teetering pile of them, all conspiring to give the holiday a kind of outsized gravitas. I’m not just a mid-30s guy sharing gifts and laughs with my small family. I’m an 8-year-old boy fawning over his new Ghostbusters action figures; a 10-year-old singing carols by the fire with the extended clan in New Hampshire, back when there was one; a college kid coming to grips with burgeoning adulthood, mimicking grown-up behavior, poorly. I’m a first-grader who still believes in Santa, and whose heart aches at the thought of him taking flight from our snow-covered roof, gone for another year. And then another. And then forever.

I’m all of these things and none of them. I’m something new, something still in the process of being made, and it likely won’t be until next Christmas when I can look back on 2016 Jeff and give him any sort of label or definition. That’s the tricky nature of time. We can’t ever truly live in the moment, because by the time we’re able to make sense of whatever moment we’re in, it isn’t that moment anymore. FYI, when my thoughts get this convoluted, it’s time to hit the eggnog, and hard.

Oftentimes I wonder if the people who don’t celebrate Christmas still experience that end-of-year time-warp sensation. It’d be hard not to. The days-long slowdown of Western civilization is pretty inescapable, a feeling in the air that trumps religion or custom. It can be sweet, sad, joyous and melancholy, sometimes all at once, but rarely can it be ignored. It’s baked into the bread, as they say.

Say what you will about the holidays, but they take their sweet time. And that’s not necessarily  a bad thing.