Holiday Speed Trap

I just can't find a reputable study that can affirm my theory on time and the holidays. After refining my data over the last several years, it's time to go public with my findings. My hope is that people of science, theology, mathematics or anyone else dedicated to the high art of discovery will join me on my quest to validate the Holiday Speed Trap.

When Thanksgiving Day passes, the rest of the year just slips through your fingers. Days snap by like cards shuffled by an expert dealer. We are constantly reminded how many shopping days remain until Christmas. We step out of the protective shells of our homes into the holiday rush, swept out to a merry sea on currents of the loudest advertising campaigns imaginable. Adrift and rudderless, we are buffeted this way and that by tv, internet, radio and print ads. Each medium sprouting tentacles, sticky with mucous, greedily searching for your credit cards and cash.

Our senses, stunned by this psychic attack, expose our vulnerabilities. The lures dangle before us, spinning and flashy and made with a rainbow of color. Barbed hooks expertly masked, designed to painlessly separate us from our money. This super-bait impacts millions of people every year resulting in perhaps, one of the oddest of phenomena known to man.
People buy the most incredibly, nonsensical items when all their good sense at any other time of the year would send them laughing in the opposite direction. Need proof?

Examine the wardrobe dysfunction. A holiday sweater observed at any other time of year could easily be confused with a Jackson Pollock experiment that used only red, green and white paints.

Food. I may be in the minority but when I see cranberry sauce on a white plate the ridges of the aluminum can are embossed into its jiggly flesh, I can't equate that to something yummy. It reminds of something one would be forced to eat in space or at the front during war. Fruitcake. No explanation needed.
Decorative items. Animated Santa's singing and shaking their butts. Again, no explanation necessary. Lights splayed in distasteful strands of holiday mockery. Millions of living trees butchered, transported, decorated with humiliating baubles and then thrown aside like yesterday's garbage.

I listen to the Harvard Business Review's podcasts. Yes, I'm in the car approximately 4-6 hours per day. You can find them at hbr.org or on iTunes. i heard that when Michelle Obama appears on the Today show or makes similar high-profile appearances, the companies who produce her clothing experience a 2% - 3% lift in their stock price. J Crew and DSW went up 2% after a recent appearance where she mentions where she shops. The First Lady creates 5x the value of endorser Tom Brady. Pretty amazing. Mrs. Obama has a wide scope of appeal and her wardrobe is more casual than some former first ladies.

Imagine if you could influence the people you come in contact with each day to do something 2% better just because you said they should. Then imagine if you visited those same people a couple time a month. Maybe once a week. That thing they're doing would get a hell of a lot better, right?

Ok. So ask your self this: who visits you every couple weeks to make you better? No one? Really? Well if that's really your answer then you better do something about it. When you cease growth you begin death. It's the creeping down-escalator to oblivion.

Back to the holiday speed thing. There's no doubt that the Earth's axis tilts in a such a way that we slide into Christmas and New Year's faster than we ought to. Then we hit February, the shortest and most boring month of the year. Beware of the speed trap. It will suck you in, sap your strength and then strand you in February.