Christmas in a Few Days? No Way! Thought We Just Celebrated the Holidays

by Linda Thorne

Yeah, right, we did celebrate the holidays, but I need to look at a calendar to remind myself it’s been a full year.

Does it seem like Christmas comes sooner each year? As a child, I remember feeling like it took forever for Christmas time. As an adult, the holidays started coming sooner; now they seem to arrive every time I turn around.

The older I get the more time flies. Why?

I’ve heard that the more time and experience behind us, the faster new time will pass. If you browse the internet, you’ll come up with all sorts of explanations, but they seem to come down to one basic truth.

Our brain ciphers new experiences into memory, but not so much the familiar ones, so the repetitive events and experiences zoom by. As an example, I have lived in the same home for over ten years and every Tuesday night I've put out the garbage for pick up the next morning. This has become so routine, it’s like I’m not even alive when I do it, and “garbage night” seems to be here the next day rather than the full week it takes in actual time.

Now, if there’s a new experience connected with “garbage night,” then it seems to lodge itself in my past for a more realistic time frame. Like the time I got skunked while taking out the garbage. Time slowed and the period between that Tuesday evening and the next felt like the full calendar week it is rather than the day or two it seems like. The same thing happened when I dropped my house and car keys into the trashcan along with the garbage, only realizing what I'd done after garbage pick-up the next morning. 

The older we get, the more routine life becomes with less unfamiliar moments. Even our thoughts, daydreams, feelings of sadness and happiness, are experiences we’ve already been through.

When I started writing my debut novel, I thought I’d be done in a year or two. It was not completely polished until eight years later, and then not published until after ten, yet the whole process seemed like such a short period of my life.  

So, here we are again with Christmas in a matter of days, which feels to me like hours, and then New Years and then all of 2019.

So, my wish for all of you is a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We'll never again be as young as we are now, so let's make the most of every minute we have, be happy, and for heaven sake enjoy these holidays because they'll be here again before we know it.



What about you? Do you ever feel you’re chasing after time? Do you have big plans for 2019?