Christmas Timey-wimey: why it's hard to tell what day it is during the festive period
That stretch of time between Christmas and New Year's Day messes with our brain's ability to keep track of time, in various ways.
At the end of A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge, throws open his bedroom window and yells to a passing urchin “You boy, what’s today?”
This may well be the earliest recorded reference to a very common phenomenon: during the Christmas period, it’s often hard to tell what day it is.
Indeed, I’m writing this during the chronological no-man’s-land that is the span of time between Christmas Day and New Year’s day. My good friend and occasional co-podcaster Dave Steele once labelled it ‘The Merrineum’, and that seems to have stuck for me. Although explaining that word to my curious mother was… tricky.
But few would argue that, during this particular time period, the days blur together. It seems like nobody can tell whether it’s Monday, Sunday, December, Solstice, dinner time, 3am, or whatever. It’s like, as the new year is downloading, daily life itself is buffering, leaving us staring vacantly at a spinning circle made out of increasingly dry cheese, and the least-popular options in the Quality Street tin.
Why, though? Minutes follow minutes, every day has 24 hours, and each day of the week occurs in the correct order, just like every other part of the year. Logically, time should pass at Christmas just like it does any other time.
But it doesn’t feel like it does. And that’s the key aspect.
Bad Timing
The human brain has a lot of (reasonably clearly defined) areas dedicated to sensing and processing specific… things. Like vision, smell, balance, and so on.
But it doesn’t really have one specific ‘time processing’ part. Instead, our ability to make sense of time, in the short, mid, and long term, is the result of a mishmash of multiple (often very different) regions, processes, and networks, cobbling together everything time-related that ends up in the brain, and presenting it as one seemingly-coherent whole.
You know those ransom notes you see in films that are written with letters cut out of newspapers and magazines? It’s like that. Only instead of a ransom note, it’s a combined digital clock, calendar, and diary. One that’s constantly updating. In real time (no pun intended).
Although, the notion of some ever-ticking metronome in our brain isn’t exactly wrong. Certain neurons in the parietal cortex show regular patterns of activity within the 100 millisecond ranges, and that these are used to track the passage of time on a ‘moment by moment’ basis.
Which makes sense. After all, recognising cause and effect (e.g. “If I do X, then Y happens”) is a fundamental aspect of our ability to learn. And we can only grasp cause and effect if we understand that one thing occurs after the other. I.e. recognise that there is an interval of time between them.
So our brains can track time. But in this case, we’re talking on the very small scale. Because if you were to ask someone “How many milliseconds has it been since your last birthday?” they probably wouldn’t be able to tell you.
Relying on the brain’s short-term timekeeping abilities to process longer spans would be like trying to cut down a giant redwood with a scalpel: technically feasible, but useless in any practical sense.
Remember when…
Unsurprisingly, our ability to recognise spans of time, beyond seconds and minutes, involves the memory system. Specifically, the hippocampus, the hub of the memory system, where all the disparate elements of an experience are combined to form specific memories. Research suggests it also incorporates specific neurological markers or traces into the memories it forms that allow the brain to recognise when an experience/memory occurred.
Which is handy. Because without that, all of your memories would be perceived as having just happened, and your brain would be like that episode of Doctor Who where all of history was happening simultaneously, after time itself broke down (again).
This means we can remember how long ago something happened, compared to when other things happened. Which gives us the ability to perceive and recognise the passage of time.
The issue here, though, is that human memory is not rigid and logically arranged. It’s way more flexible, and variable. Memories can be enhanced, changed, and modulated by many other things going on in the brain. Particularly, emotion, and attention.
If an experience has a greater emotional impact on us, then it’ll form more significant, lasting memories.1 That’s why the memory of a horrifyingly embarrassing incident from our teens remains vivid decades later, while the memory of yesterday’s unremarkable commute is already faded.
And then there’s attention. The more attention you pay to something, the more it’s represented in your brain, the more this particular point in time is occupying your brain space. So, time seems to ‘slow down’, because your brain is more ‘in the moment’, doing whatever it is that demands such attention.
It’s like zooming in on a very small part of an image, so that it takes up the whole screen. Only, with time, instead of visuals.
What this means is that some parts of your memory stand out way more than others, because the amount of emotion/attention an experience involves depends entirely on the situation you’re in, in that moment.
This is helpful when it comes to processing time. If you’re looking at a completely featureless plane that stretches to the horizon, it’s really hard to gauge distance, because your brain has little to work with.
But if you’ve got landmarks, like trees, buildings, mountains etc., it’s a lot easier to figure out how near or far certain things are, in relation to you.
These significant experiences may be providing a similar function for ‘navigating’ time via our memory. The ‘time stamp’ aspect of each memories provides the featureless plane, receding into the distance, and the significant memories provide landmarks. Hence we say things like “It’s been ages since [my last holiday]” or “Aren’t we due to meet up with [Good friend you’ve not seen for weeks]?”, rather than citing specific dates and times, or spans of time down to the second.
Feel the rhythm
Another method our brains use to navigate time is rhythms, and patterns. Our brains love finding the pattern or sequence in things. It’s said to be one of our most important abilities, and it’s a big part of how we perceive the world around us.
This is true for recognising time, too. We have a lot of internal mechanisms to help with this. The most obvious of which is the circadian rhythm, which dictates our sleep cycle, and also helps us recognise the passage of time (hence the dreaded “Only X more sleeps ‘til Christmas!").
Other biological rhythms can be set via diet. If we eat similar amounts at the same time every day, it seems our brain learns this so fundamentally, that our internal glucose levels seemingly change in anticipation. So, diet helps your brain recognise what time it is, in a roundabout way.
And then there are the more ‘external’ rhythms. Like work. A standard 9 to 5 means every week is structured the same, so we can predict what’s coming, hence we refer to things like ‘hump day’ or ‘living for the weekend’.
There are longer term ones too, like birthdays, anniversaries, seasons etc. These help us instinctively know, with a degree of confidence, where we ‘are’ in the year, time-wise.
Like I said, our perception of time is a great big mishmash of many things.
And then Christmas comes along…
It’s Christmas Time!
All of the things I’ve mentioned that help us locate ourselves in time? The Christmas period screws around with nearly all of them.
Our perception of time is guided by memory, and memory is dictated by emotion. Assuming you’re not a character in a UK Soap Opera, the Christmas period is generally a happy one. Alternatively, it can be pretty stressful. Or sad, if you’re isolated or alone. But in general, the emotional quality of Christmas is consistent.
And if you’re experiencing similar emotions day after day, then nothing is actually standing out in your memory. It’s becoming the ‘smooth plain’ again2.
But if it is a happy Christmas you’re having, that could be making your perception of time even worse. Remember, attention is also a big part of how our brain processes time, and studies show that a positive emotional state widens cognitive focus. Meanwhile, a negative emotional experience tends to narrow our attentional focus.
If our attention is like the lights in a theatre, negative emotions use the spotlights, while positive emotions use the houselights, illuminating everything3.
But as we’ve seen, if we’re not focussing intently on something, we’re less likely to process and recognise time passing. Ergo, the Christmas period is basically designed to throw off two fundamental ways in which our brains process time.
On top of that, having several days off work is great, but it does mean any learned 9 to 5 pattern we use to recognise which day is which no longer applies. And even if you do go back to work during the merrineum, you’ve got another bank holiday coming up very soon, distorting the pattern even more.
The capitalism-powered encroachment of the festive period ever earlier into the calendar may be a factor here. When the external cues of Christmas (decorations, the music, confections etc) are visible in early November, they’ll obviously become less specific, and less useful as temporal landmarks.
Then there’s the indulgence. “Go on, it’s Christmas!” is a common refrain, but eating and drinking way more than usual will undoubtedly have effects, and not just on the waste line.
Remember, your brain also uses sleep and diet routines and rhythms to help understand where we are in time. Indulging in too much alcohol and/or rich food can throw a spanner into these things too.
I could go on, but the point is, as enjoyable as it may be, the festive period has many qualities that scupper our brain’s ability to keep track of the days4. Hence we often end up like Scrooge, asking other people the date.
Although, having said that, Scrooge was also someone who’d just woken up from multiple potent hallucinations, then demanded that a presumably penniless child go buy him a giant goose, from a butchers shop, on Christmas morning5.
So maybe his grasp of reality was already pretty shaky, and I shouldn’t use him as a benchmark.
I cover much of this, and more, in my book Emotional Ignorance.
The system our brain uses to form memories is very old, so old that it predates rational thought and sentience. This means it’s still adhering to the more primitive framework of “If something triggers an emotional response, then it’s important”. Why yes, I did write a whole book about this sort of thing.
Which may also help explain the memory deficits linked to depression, a disorder which very much involves ‘a consistent emotional state’.
Why? I’ll explain that in a later piece.
You could say the exact same about the COVID-19 Lockdown, during which people often expressed similar difficulties with memory and tracking the days.
Granted, this was Victorian London, and he was basically the Mister Burns of the area, so maybe things would just happen because he insisted they should?