It’s good to be back on schedule
At the end of A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge wakes up, runs to the window, and shouts to a boy below, “What’s to-day?”
I used to think this was because he had been moved by the spirits that had visited him during the night, and he feared he had missed the chance to make things right and not be such a jerk going forward.
But now I’m betting it’s because that year, Christmas fell on a Wednesday, the way it just did for us.
Over the holidays, I had no ghostly guests, no glimpses into my dark future, no nighttime wanderings through time and space. But during the very long break I had, I woke up asking, “What’s to-day?” almost every morning.
“Was it the weekend? Did I have to be somewhere? Had I skipped my oil change?”
The first couple times it happened, during what seemed like the 16 to 18 days between Friday, Dec. 20, and Wednesday, Dec. 25, I needed close to a minute to answer my own question.
What a great feeling.
That momentary disorientation confirmed that I had indeed escaped the grip of a daily schedule and had launched into official Vacation Mode. Maybe I didn’t know what day it was, but I didn’t need to; every day was wide open.
Then Christmas happened—on a Wednesday—and things got weird.
A few days later, when I again woke up unsure of the day, I felt no glee. I rubbed my head and tried to think. Would stores be open today? Had I missed the trash pickup? Had we even had Christmas yet?
One by one, moments from the previous days resolved into a cloudy but linear outline of events. “Oh right, it’s Friday!” I said at last. (It was Saturday, but whatever.)
New Year’s came and went, again on a Wednesday. By then, I couldn’t tell the difference between a day and a week, and I started to think I might be losing my grip. When I woke up on a couple of the mornings between Jan. 1 and my return to work on Monday the 6th, the confusion wasn’t amusing; it was distressing. Was it the weekend? Did I have to be somewhere? Had I skipped my oil change?
I paced the house over those final few days, concerned that I had missed a deadline or forgotten to pay an important bill. I needed to get back to the familiar comfort of my mundane, monotonous, predictable schedule.
As a sanity self-check disguised as small talk, I made inquiries of friends. I’d say things like “My neighbor told me she flew out of bed one morning because she thought she had overslept, but it turned out she was still on her holiday break. That’s nothing I—I mean she—should see a doctor about, though, right?”
Through this discreet approach, I learned that I was not the only person who, for example, had spent all of Jan. 2 under the misapprehension that it was a Monday. I’m all too aware that my synapses don’t fire with the speed and precision they once did, so I took comfort thinking maybe at least one other person pulled up to the post office on a Sunday this holiday season.
Bottom line: Wednesdays simply aren’t tenable for Christmas and New Year’s. A holiday on any other day of the week forms a long weekend, a minor mental adjustment from the five-day week. A Wednesday holiday, however, falls too late in the week to be part of the previous weekend and too early to be part of the next. It’s chaos.
Not knowing what day it was may have started off cute, but there’s a fine line between “delighting in a few seconds of uncertainty” and “thinking I need a medical evaluation.” This year, with the Wednesday holidays, I skirted too close to the latter.
Luckily, I found the cure for this muddled perception of time: mild trauma, also known as “returning to work.”
The recovery wasn’t instantaneous. I clocked in on Monday not knowing the password to my computer. It took until late Tuesday before I was clear on what my job entailed. I’m still not entirely sure why all these people are emailing me, or why they think I know anything about the “projects” they keep referring to. But at least now I wake up knowing what day it is.
That said, it’s going to take at least another week before I stop dating everything “2024.”
✦ ✦ ✦
(Originally published in the Addison Independent January 2024—no, 2025!)
