The Goose is Getting Fat

I'm a child of the sixties, which means that I spent much of my formative years in the era of that much maligned musical genre, glam rock. I love a bit of Sweet, Mud or T. Rex, but even I have my limits. And I'm not just talking about the social unacceptability of admitting a liking for Gary Glitter's musical output. 

No, much as I love them I don't want to listen to Slade or Wizzard's Christmas classics while some people are still trying to plan their summer holidays. Like the first cuckoo of spring, Christmas can be said to start when Noddy Holder first bellows "It's Chrissssssssssss-maaaaaaaassssss!!!" from behind the Halloween trimmings in Clinton's Cards. This year he started earning his royalties in the middle of September.

The preparation for Christmas seems to start earlier and earlier each year when kids start emailing Santa the order number for their most coveted toys from the Argos catalogue, but it seems to come around with more frequency too. I could have sworn that it was only ten weeks ago since last Christmas and yet, like Ken Dodd's farewell tours, another one's here already. It seems as though nowhere near a year has passed since the last one.

I have a theory about this. I think that the frequency of Christmases doesn't change as we get older, but the way that we store them in our heads does.

Remember how, when you're very young, summers seem to last forever? The summers in your forties, fifties and beyond go by in the blink of an eye but those when you numbered your age in single figures? They seem to stretch to the horizon and beyond even though logically they can only have lasted the same three months maximum as those of your later years.

I think that it's because our brains only have a finite amount of space in which we can hold 'Summer Memories', like a fixed-size hard drive. So when we're (say) seven years old we can stick massive amounts of detail about the few summers that we can remember in there. We hold on to the smell of a newly painted shed, the lazy drone of a honey bee, the sickly sweet taste of a lollipop. As we age that same hard drive in our brains has to try to hang on to the tiny special memories of tens of summers. It can't do it, so it compresses them, making them all seem the same. A generic summer with just the very special parts standing out. And as they all merge into one big memory then they seem to come around with alarming swiftness.

And, as it is with summer, so with Christmas. An adult lifespan's-worth of them all crammed into a memory box designed for just those magnificent Christmases of childhood when all we had to worry about was how Father Christmas would manage to get into our house since the previous owner had removed the chimney a decade before our birth (don't worry kids; he has a special key).

I tried this theory out on my Beloved. I figured that she'd smile, nod and agree that this must be precisely how our memories work, I must have stumbled upon the reason why we think that there's less time between Christmases now than there used to be.

After all these years together you'd think I'd know better. She just laughed and said, 'No love, they only seem to come around quicker because you're getting old.'

Ah. Maybe that's it.

© Shaun Finnie 2012