By Kirk Ross
The year 2011 is over. You know that don’t you? If you have anything planned beyond swimming with the tide, fugedaboutit.
By the time you catch up with everything you needed to do before Thanksgiving, the kids will be climbing the walls, the gift list looming and the never-ending courtesies of social life gobbling up the minutes.
Meanwhile the Heels have scheduled approximately two-and-a-half dozen basketball games between now and the end of the year.
The compression of time at the end of the year, like a spinning quarter rattling ever more rapidly as it winds down, just seems to be getting worse. Eons ago, I recall we had longer years, but with the last six weeks of the year now reserved exclusively for the holidays’ year-end shuffle, a 10-month, two-week calendar is the new norm.
For those of us who travel, the almost full month between when we get back home from Thanksgiving and head out again for Christmas flies by. For those of us hosting the return of migratory relatives, there seems hardly time to miss ’em.
The various end of the year festivities – feasting, yuletide and so on – make sense when you consider that this used to be downtime for the Northern Hemisphere. When they’re overlaid on all the modern end-of-the-year to-dos, it’s a recipe for mass anxiety.
Most of us no longer work in places governed by the changing of the seasons, nor do we have the luxury of extended time away. We’re more likely to have to work ahead in order to get time off. And then there’s the folks in retail, for whom this is harvest season and no time to play.
Even the kids are caught up in this trend. I’m sure the school system didn’t intend to ratchet up the anxiety of its pupils when a few years back it extended the second quarter into the new year, but it means that all during winter break lurks the dread of mid-terms. Studies are important, of course, but can’t our children have a few glorious weeks of squabbling with siblings and proclaiming their eternal boredom uninterrupted by worries about their class rankings and grade point averages?
This is not to say that the six-week period in which we hurtle headlong into the next year is without its joys. Many of us have adapted to the schedule-juggling and socializing and can actually enjoy this stretch of time. Some people even seem proficient in it, kicking into a gear unused the rest of the year. They cruise through the season in holiday overdrive while the rest of us marvel as they blow past us. Is that really a smile, we wonder, or just the g-forces?
It’s worth it, of course, even for those of us who are not deft at handling the pace. Like a mess of cascading quarks in a particle collider, we’re bound to make contacts we didn’t anticipate and end up in orbits unexpected.
And there are those quiet moments, lulls in the din, when reconnecting with friends and family eclipses the glitz and glitter and we find that thing so easily lost sight of – the companionship of the tribe, old and new, and the precious warmth and light it offers here in winter’s deep. This is when we miss the people we miss most of all and try our damnedest to remind those we hold dear just how glad we are that they’re still around. We hold each other a little closer here in the darkest days of the year, even if at times it’s just to escape for a moment from the season’s frenzy. The convivial rituals of the end of the year all make sense in that context. Journeys back home, an audience with a boisterous uncle, a secret shared with a sibling, the consumption of foods outside our comfort zone – these are old things. Very old. Older than an animated Santa riding an electric shaver. They’re what we are really rushing around trying to elbow out more time for, no matter what the to-do list says.