Speaker For The Diodes - December 31st, 2010

05:24 am - QotD

From "Why Time Seems to Slow Down in Emergencies", by Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience.com, 2007-12-11, regarding experiments by David Eagleman and others at Baylor College of Medicine:

[S]uch time warping seems to be a trick played by one's memory. When a person is scared, a brain area called the amygdala becomes more active, laying down an extra set of memories that go along with those normally taken care of by other parts of the brain.

"In this way, frightening events are associated with richer and denser memories," Eagleman explained. "And the more memory you have of an event, the longer you believe it took."

Eagleman added this illusion "is related to the phenomenon that time seems to speed up as you grow older. When you're a child, you lay down rich memories for all your experiences; when you're older, you've seen it all before and lay down fewer memories. Therefore, when a child looks back at the end of a summer, it seems to have lasted forever; adults think it zoomed by."

05:16 pm - Seven Swans A-Swimming

I forgot to add this under today's QotD: Happy Hogmanay!

As in most recent years, I found myself unaffected by the whole Christmas thing, other than noticing a sort of strangely hectic feeling to my environment, messed-up television schedules, and carols on the radio, for most of the buildup to Christmas (the Extended Commercial Advent Season). I really didn't feel like I had any of that "Christmas spirit" until after my pain meds started working on Christmas day. Now, I do like Christmas, or at least I think I do -- during other parts of the year (except around Hallowe'en when I see "Christmas" starting way too early), thoughts of Christmas bring a smile, and I fondly remember Christmases past. But I just don't find myself getting into it, or even realizing just how close it's getting, until it's right on top of me.

I finally start thinking, "Oh yeah, Christmas; this'll be fun," right before everybody around me says, "Okay, Christmas is over now that we've had the family stuff on the 25th".

Is this because of over-saturation with Commercial Christmas Advent for so long ahead of time that even by the time Advent starts it's all become background noise? Am I just out of sync? Is it that I don't like Christmas as much as I think I do?

But as I was struggling to get myself ready to go enjoy Christmas on the 25th, this thought hit me: I may be oddly out of sync with my culture, which seems to want to give Christmas the entire month of December (kind of like Ramadan getting a whole month in its calendar) and start looking forward to it by Thanksgiving ... but I'm actually kinda in sync with the actual calendar, since, after all if we want to be technically correct pedantic about it (matters of preparations aside), Christmas itself is longer than a day, but doesn't start until 25 December (or really the night before, since that anticipatory party is properly a big deal) -- Christmas starts on the 25th and runs for twelve days, ending the night before Epiphany (or thirteen days if you count Epiphany as really being the last day of Christmas). So I'm finally feeling all Christmasy during Christmas, but in the meantime my culture, having started a month or so early, has left me behind (since American society as a whole pays effectively no attention to the old-calendar Orthodox folks whose Christmas hasn't started yet).

So whatever the actual cause, the result is that I'm actually having warm, fuzzy, yay-Christmas feelings and thinking Christmas thoughts and humming Christmas carols when (technically) Christmas is going on, while all around me ask, "Aren't you tired of that yet? We just finished Christmas!"

I was also thinking about different families' traditions about when to erect and decorate the Christmas tree, and various friends' opinions on when public/commercial/media Christmas displays "ought to be allowed" to start. There seems to be a general consensus that immediately after (US) Thanksgiving is acceptable, if only grudgingly by some, but some of my friends have said they'd be much happier if the "Christmas season" started a mere couple of weeks before the holy day itself -- let us enjoy a bit of December as December, instead of December-as-synonym-for-Christmas; let us have a bit of separation between (US) Thanksgiving and the start of being-surrounded-by-Christmas so that they feel like two separate holidays and it's easier for Christmas to Feel Special, rather than one too-long "holiday" that starts at Thanksgiving and ends at Christmas with burnout and no real feeling of Christmas as a separate entity. (I'm sure lots of people do manage to feel that they're two distinct holidays anyhow, but the handful of folks I've actually spoken to about this recently have felt as I do: that the lack of separation-in-time grossly undermines the specialness of Christmas and promotes holiday burnout.) realinterrobang recently quoted a commenter at Balloon Juice (Ross Hershberger) as saying, "Everyone thinks that everyone else thinks the holidays are great, but I'll bet a secret vote would legally restrict Christmas to 2.25 days/year and we'd be free of it the rest of the time."

Anyhow, regarding family traditions ...

I know people whose family tradition is to decorate the tree late on Thanksgiving or sometime the day after. This makes sense to me in the context of the modern Commerical Advent Season, which used to start on Black Friday and this year apparently started a week or two before Thanksgiving. I know people who don't have a specific formula for when it's time to put up the tree, but do it sometime in mid- or even late-December, when it feels like Christmas is actually getting close and/or the kids are clamoring for it. (I'm not sure I'm remembering correctly, but I think my family was in this category when I was growing up.) And I've heard of -- and probably know -- folks whose family tradition was to not start decorating the tree until Christmas Eve, which sounded precariously late to me until I started thinking more about the calendar, and now makes perfect sense to me: maybe you buy your live tree a bit before then (or assemble your artificial one), but that's just prep: the "we're now decorated for the holiday" part starts when Christmas is actually about to arrive. While I do like the sight of a lighted Christmas tree in the living room for a while in December as a reminder that Christmas is in fact coming despite my inattention, I think I could do fine with the idea of the tree getting decorated as part of the "Christmas is finally here" mental state, not the "we're going to spend a month thinking about Christmas" one.

Though I don't think this would work for my sister, who (I'm told) has eight Christmas trees in her house.

Left to my own devices, I'd probably aim for about a week before Christmas for setting up the tree. That's about when I plug in the Christmas lights that I leave draped in my front windows year-round -- I unplug them on either new-calendar Epiphany or old-calendar Epiphany, depening on when I feel quite done with Christmas each year.

In any case, unless you're either old-calendar Orthodox or non-Christian, happy Seventh Day Of Christmas! Oh, and happy Gregorian New Year's Eve (or if you don't see this until tomorrow, Happy New Year) to everyone.