December 2025, 10 Minutes

Time and Christmas

Being and the Suspension of Ordinary Time

The past returns.

The future pauses.

The present thickens.

Oh, it’s so thick (that’s what she said, I guess). A viscous goo that slows all and exhausts the muscles that resist. So this time of year feels to me, and I’m sure not me alone. The nowness of everything becomes almost overwhelming. It creeps and crawls about the place, distracting and disorientating, shunting a fragile sense of self into corners where it can watch and wait. It’s as though the fabric of time itself becomes disordered, tumbled up, breaching its own well-established rules. For some, this brings relief from the mundane, the joy of forgetting and being; for others it brings home an anxiety of the unfamiliar, the breaking of a pact.

I am interested in time, small and capital t. History was probably my preferred subject growing up, and science fiction remains one of my favourite genres of fiction, both in written and screen form, so I have always had an appreciation for what was and what could one day be. Additionally, the multiple and varied eras of the catch-all dinosaurs have always held a special place in my heart, too, and even as I approach (or let’s be real, already find myself) in middle age, I still sometimes dream of them, as I once did as a boy. Ok, so the dino thing is stretching it a bit. Granted. But still, the point remains, I like things that are no longer here or have not yet come.

If I had a God, Time (or Chronos) would be they. To my shame, Time is a god I disrespect. I have not made the most of the time I have been given, have failed and betrayed it often, filled it with empty nothings. I’m not sure if Time has a hell (or a heaven), but I fear if I don’t shape up soon, I am destined for it.

Time as a god is an obvious metaphor often used, and in the past has on occasion been seen literally. I wish to explore it bit here.

We experience time constantly, but we never see it directly; it’s everywhere and yet nowhere. Seconds, days, years pass, slip away, invisibly but undeniably. We can measure it with clocks, calendars, or cosmic events, human made artefacts and paradigms that require nodding along. yet time itself cannot be touched or held. This makes it both intimately familiar and mysteriously intangible.

We are born, we age, we die. At least that’s the idea. Philosophers call this temporality: the way we are always “stretched” like spaghetti noodles between the past, present, and future. Our plans, regrets, hopes, and memories all exist in time. Without it, our sense of self and narrative would collapse into an existential singularity that we would probably never escape.

Time is also relative and subjective. Einstein (stealing the work of better, smarter men, notably Poincare and Lorenz) showed that time is not fixed; it depends on speed and gravity. A clock on fast-moving orbiting spaceships ticks differently than those on Earth. This has been proven countless times. Meanwhile, psychological studies show us that time feels different depending on what we’re doing: minutes can drag in boredom or fly by in joy or busyness; the same hour, lived differently, can feel like eternity or a heartbeat.

Time is also meaning. Not all of life’s meaning, but a one of the foundational meanings (love and reproduction being more examples; I’ll let you decide on other ones). It gives structure and context to everything. The events of our lives gain or lose significance because of when they happen and in relation to other events. Think of how time powers how we reflect nostalgically, or how we chase down, or are chased down by, deadlines, appointments. An oncologist telling a Stage 4 patient they have six months to live gives that patient a timeframe into which the entirety of their remaining life must be lived. This can give every moment a profound sense of meaning.

Time connects the micro and macro, the big, the middle and the small. Time links the fleeting and the eternal. A second matters to a sprinter; centuries matter to an historian. Cosmic time spans galaxies and the endless black depths between them. This connection between personal experience and universal phenomena makes time a bridge between the ordinary and the sublime.

Time flows forward relentlessly, yet we remember the past and imagine the future. It is continuous but can be experienced in discrete moments. It can heal yet also age us. It is both infinite and acutely finite for each of us. This paradoxical nature, as with all paradoxes, captures the mind and invites it into deep reflection and even wonder.

So, it’s omnipresent yet invisible, requires interpretation (clocks, calendars) connect the small and the big, frames meaning, and shapes our existence – and has a heavy dollop of the paradoxical, too – sounds like a God to me.

Absolute Time, Absolutely

But, tapping into my Aristotelian side and bringing myself down from the Hellenic clouds as gently as possible, perhaps, before we go on, I should actually try and define time. It may help illuminate the sometimes dark, murky paths of thought and, also, first principles must, after all (before all?), come first.

Time has long been a central concern in both philosophy and science, inspiring diverse theories about its nature, flow, and perception. Across history, thinkers have proposed ways to understand time as absolute, relational, subjective, cyclical, or even emergent, reflecting both human experience and the wider universe - that we can see and that which we cannot.

The classical conception of time begins with Absolute Time, first proposed by Isaac Newton and his applefall head. Newton viewed time as uniform and independent of events, flowing like a river that exists “out there”, objectively, regardless of human experience or observation. Under this foundational and, honestly intuitive, model, all observers share the same temporal framework, and clocks are merely a human-made tool measure an already-existing flow, like putting one’s hand in the river. Later, of course, Einstein’s theory of relativity challenged this view, showing that time depends on motion and gravity, and is therefore not absolute.

In contrast, Relational Time, associated with primarily Leibniz, who was doing his work at the same time as Newton, posits that time does not exist independently but emerges from the relationships between events. According to this view, without change, time has no meaning; the universe without events would have no “before” or “after.” So, unlike Newton’s fixed background, relational time is indexical, depending entirely on the sequence of occurrences, suggesting that temporality is a measure of change itself.

Moving swiftly from science to philosophy - a line that is often blurry - specifically metaphysics, we get some real big brain stuff.

The two primary school of thought here are A-Theory (Dynamic Time), where time flows and the present is privileged, and B-Theory (Static Time), which treats all points in time as equally real, with past, present, and future as relational labels.

Presentism, a form of A-Theory, asserts that only the present is real, while the past and future are unreal. Time is experienced as constantly “flowing,” with the present as the only genuine moment. Thinkers as varied as Augustine and A.N. Prior advocated this view, though understandings in modern physics complicates it by suggesting that past and future may exist as tangibly as the present.

In contrast, Eternalism, or the Block Universe Theory, maintains that past, present, and future all exist equally within a four-dimensional spacetime block. Time does not truly flow; the apparent movement is an illusion. This perspective aligns closely with Einsteinian relativity, framing all events as coexisting within spacetime.

There are some middle grounds here. One such space is offered by the Growing Block Theory, proposed by C.D. Broad, which suggests that the past and present exist while the future does not. Unlike eternalism, the future remains open, and the universe “grows” as time progresses.

Cyclical time was once the mode understanding for most civilisations. From the seasonal rhythms honoured by agricultural societies to the grand celestial cycles described in Hindu, Mayan, and ancient Greek cosmologies. Life, death, rebirth - these were seen as recurring patterns rather than linear progressions, and human existence was conceived as part of an eternal return rather than a one-way journey to the future oblivion. A mobius strip of life unravelling and reforming. To this day, this view still holds a sway among those with a critical eye on history. Repeating patterns are undeniable, and it does make one think that, if we do find ourselves in cycle, where exactly in it are we currently?

Beyond these metaphysical models, phenomenological and psychological theories focus on lived experience. Phenomenological time, explored by Husserl, Heidegger (more on this guy later), and Bergson, emphasizes that time is primarily to be experienced, not measured. For example, during certain times of the year (hint, hint), the subjective, yet universal, thickening of moments demonstrates how memory, anticipation, and mental state can alter temporal perception. Similarly, psychological or subjective time depends on attention, consciousness, and memory; seconds may feel prolonged when bored or fleeting when engaged, a phenomenon widely studied in cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

Time is not (just) Human

I touched on the subjectivity of time earlier. Let me expand a bit. As far as we know, time is not experienced uniformly across species. Unlike us humans, whose perception of time is structured largely by clocks, social conventions and the stars, those creatures big and small in the wider animal kingdom perceive, process, and respond to time according to their biology, unique cognitions, and, crucially, survival needs. This variation is just another reminder that, though we share a planet, we live in very different worlds.

Perception speed varies among animals, creating different temporal resolutions. The reasons for this are multiple; metabolism, lifespan, neural processing speed, ecological pressures, and internal clocks. Think of hummingbirds (I don’t often, but for the purpose of this piece I did – often). These feverish little birds compress much of their activity into brief lives, so individual seconds carry more significance relative to their overall lifespan. They also have higher flicker-fusion thresholds (this is the point at which a series of visual images appears continuous) and may experience seconds as information-rich and lengthy. For instance, a fly, another animal with such a threshold, can detect movements that humans cannot, making its experience of “now” occur in much shorter increments. Seemingly, to a fly, time probably moves more slowly, allowing rapid reactions to threats. Conversely, larger, longer living animals such as elephants (or less large – us) have slower perceptual processing, which can make events unfold more gradually and extend their subjective experience of time. The tortoises of St Helena (yes, I do have a lovely mental image of Napoleon petting them on his daily constitutionals, as unlikely as that may be), the oldest living land animals on earth may (I will continue to use uncertain language here – we cannot know these things for sure, as, to begin with, we can’t ask Douglas the Tortoise how he feels about the passage of time, but we can test and approximate and guestimate) experience whole decades without marking any particular subjective distinctions.

Humans, if their brains are working right, possess episodic memory, enabling reflection on past experiences and planning for the future. Basically, it gives us a both-ways sense of time-depth. Some animals, including birds, apes, elephants, and dolphins, display similar, albeit simpler, abilities. These are often linked to survival tasks such as locating food or avoiding predators. However, it should be noted that for many species, our distant ancestors included, time is closely tied to immediate environmental cues, such as daylight cycles, seasons, and feeding patterns, rather than abstract concepts of past or future. Abstraction is, ultimately, the most human of conditions (and, undoubtably, on occasion, flaws).

Experimental research confirms these differences. Pigeons and rats can distinguish intervals in the seconds-to-minutes range, though their perception of longer durations differs. Honeybees, the most blessed of all creation, demonstrate remarkable time-of-day awareness, remembering when specific flowers open, suggesting an internal clock so sensitive that it integrates environmental cycles.

(Dog owners out there, don’t forget: your wards may perceive time differently to yourself. Try your best not to leave them alone too long.)

So we’ve covered the living things of earth, but what of the things out there…

Ted Chiang’s short story Story of Your Life (later adapted into the movie Arrival, directed by Denis Villeneuve) offers a unique take on time and the perception thereof. The story follows a linguist tasked with communicating with an alien species called the very-alien sounding Heptapods (basically air-floating octopus-jellyfish). Unlike humans, the Heptapods perceive time nonlinearly: they experience past, present, and future simultaneously. As the linguist learns their language, her consciousness reshapes, allowing her to perceive her own life in a non-sequential way.

Life on earth evolved under particular circumstances. Gravity, temperature, physical constraints, even sensory bandwidths (famously the Big 5). When this is considered, it could be argued that extraterrestrials would, almost by definition, have to have a different temporal understanding. This would be especially true if they had traversed the vastness of galactic space, maybe even intergalactic space. For mortal life to do this, the ability to manipulate time in some sway would be almost certainly necessary. So maybe aliens won’t be fascinating because they look funny, or they have mad stories to tell. Our minds may ultimately be blown due to where they exist in time, and how that reflects our own potentially limited conception.

Now, I’m gonna leave this part of the conversation right here, as I cannot really go any further here without delving fully into the dizzyingly commodious realm of sci-fi and theoretical speculation. As fun as that is, that’s a story for another day.

How Long Does Ink Take to Dry?

As we saw with the Ted Chiang example, time has a long and strong grip on the imaginations of writers, artists and film makers.

It’s perfect, really. It serves as both a thematic focus and a structural device across genres. Time can be bent, fragmented, reversed, or suspended, allowing creators to mirror inner states of memory, trauma, longing, and anticipation in observable terms. In doing so, narratives about time, how lives are shaped, understood, endure, change, often become narratives about meaning itself.

Christopher Nolan made and nearly broke a career based on time. Memento, Inception & Interstellar, and Tenet being the rise, double peak and fall of his creative cycle. Before Nolan crossed the Atlantic to kickstart his Hollywood arch, the quintessential movie about time was of course Groundhog Day. I have written before on how I see Groundhog Day as a horror movie. A philosophical horror movie. This is a distinction with a difference (if in doubt, reflect upon how long Phil Connors spends in the loop, the repetition, how even suicide cannot release him). Time as a device is easier to display on screen, for obvious reasons. But it must be respected as storytelling gadget, so as not to become hackneyed or cheap, or overly convoluted to the point of the narrative becoming fuzzy or smeared across the story.

It would be churlish of me to discuss tales of time without mentioning Proust. The reclusive Frenchman’s monumental In Search of Lost Time examines memory and consciousness through “involuntary memory,” where past moments resurface vividly in the present, as in the famous madeleine cake episode.

What makes Proust especially significant is that he does not treat memory as a passive archive, dusty boxes hidden away down endless shelved corridors of similar boxes, but as an active force that collapses time-distance. The past, when properly awakened, is not recalled so much as re-lived, arriving with its original emotional intensity intact. In this sense, Proust anticipates phenomenological accounts of time by showing that lived time is not linear or chronological but layered and recursive. Moments from decades earlier coexist with the present, reshaping identity and meaning in retrospect. Time, for Proust, is not something that passes; rather, it accumulates, folds back on itself, and reveals itself only when consciousness is momentarily freed from the anguish of the present.

H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine is an earlier literary example, depicting a harshly Newtonian linear and absolute time through literal travel. The narrative explores evolution, mortality, and deep time, engaging readers with the implications of temporality beyond human scales, as well as mixing the pettiness of choice and incident with the massiveness of earth-time. We are invited to see the Morlocks as descendent creatures of horror, abomination of dysgenic evolution. However, it has always struck me that the Elois are equally horrific in their existence, beginning of extreme naivete and decadence, removed from survival instincts, therefore removed from the ability for higher thought or experience.

One of the most horrifying and beautiful things ever written was Waiting for Godot. Sam Beckett’s work suspends time, creating a cyclical, existentially meaningless experience that underscores boredom, repetition, and anticipation.

The terror lies not in what happens, but in what never does. Meaning is perpetually deferred, arrival eternally postponed. The characters endure rather than live, trapped in a present that refuses to become the past or the future. In Beckett’s pocket universe, hope itself becomes a mechanism of cruelty, sustaining existence without ever justifying it. If you have not read or watched this work, I would recommend only doing to when in good form, perhaps on a sunny day.

If you’re looking for a contrasting tale of the stage, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia gives us opposing 19th-century and modern perspectives, taking advantage of acceleration in theoretical physics, it integrates thermodynamics, chaos theory, and the basic human experience in its narrative and themes (I’ve not seen this one performed, but have read the script). Stoppard tells us that, ultimately, love and beauty are the only things that can truly overcome time’s heavy march. The inherent hope found is this tale distinguishes itself from Godot; where Vladamir and Estragon are eternally tied to the quiet country lane, Thomasina Coverly is tied to nothing but experience and will. Where the two mumbling men are imprisoned by time, she is liberated by it.

The subject of time is not just for the prosaic mind, mind. The theme is also deeply embedded in poetry (because how could it not be?), where it transects memory, mortality, consciousness, and is often utilised as the most bittersweet of all devices. For instance, T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton, from Four Quartets, explores time as a simultaneous experience of past, present, and future. Eliot, leaning into the modern, and the advancements in scientific understanding and the exponential growth (I’m reticent to say “explosion”) in the field of physics at the time, contemplates temporality and eternity, famously writing, “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future.”

Similarly, William Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality reflects on the passage of childhood, the (often painful, often beautiful, sometimes both) persistence of memory, and the loss of innocence, highlighting how time shapes perception and the human spirit; while W.H. Auden’s As I Walked Out One Evening reminds us of the unstoppable march of clocks, its unavoidable intersection with mortality, and the worthiness of finding good love in all of it.

(I omitted Dickens’ A Christmas Carol which is obviously predicated upon a time MacGuffin, mostly because I have written extensively on the tale before and I hate being intellectually repetitive.)

Achtung! Lichtung!

I earlier promised more Heidegger; now I shall deliver him down your chimney.

Christmas is, in essence, a togethering time. A time for family and reconciliation. Reflection and forgiveness. The weather, at least in the northern hemisphere, encourages these outlooks, as we are locked in, forced together, seeking the warmth and comfort of others. The outside world is dying, waiting for rebirth, and so is the inside world, a place as infinite as the universe itself.

From a Heideggerian perspective, Christmas offers a rare interruption in the ordinary flow of time, revealing subtle and existential dimensions of the human experiences. To that end, being so culturally and personally significant for so many on earth, a shared experience like no other, it is a good place for us to study human time. In Being and Time, Heidegger emphasises that human existence - what he calls Dasein - is always immersed in time. Time is not merely a sequence of measurable moments; it is the very structure through which we experience being.

Ordinary life has a brutal tendency to fragment time. The past becomes a set of memories, often fuzzy, inconsistent, relegated to nostalgia or history; the future dominates through planning, goals, and anxieties; and the present slips through unnoticed, occupied by routines and responsibilities and the ratlike racing. Heidegger terms this ordinary mode of existence “falling” into the world of the they (das Man), where we are absorbed in convention and distraction. Christmas is a disrupter. It fucks with this pattern with snowbells jingling and jangling as it does. During the holiday, the past can return vividly: childhood memories, absent relatives and faraway loves, and old traditions resurface. Furthermore, they lose their abstraction and concretise into lived experience. A familiar festive song (we all have a favourite…), the smell of Christmas cooking, the sight of decorations, tasteful and garish – these can all momentarily collapse the temporal distance, making what was gone feel present again. In Heideggerian terms, the past becomes “present-at-hand,” revealing the continuity and finitude of existence.

Simultaneously, the future loses some of its usual urgency. Work schedules pause, deadlines are delayed, and the compulsion to produce is suspended. This relaxation of future-directed anxieties allows Dasein to inhabit the present more fully. Heidegger describes this as authentic temporality: the capacity to engage with existence in a manner unmediated by external pressures (The de rigueur understanding of this would be mindfulness, though I believe Heidegger’s thoughtful approach is more robust). As I noted at the beginning of this piece, the present thickens during Christmas. The otherwise ordinary or mundane develops overwhelming significance, they become dense precisely because we are less preoccupied with forward momentum.

Don’t pull the cracker yet, Heidegger’s not quite done. His concept of the clearing (Lichtung) further illuminates what could be considered the phenomenology of Christmas (a term whose lifespan probably only exist in the writing and reading of this piece). The clearing is a space in which Being can appear more clearly, unobscured by distraction or technological enframing. Christmas, by suspending ordinary obligations, functions as such a clearing. Relationships, memory, absence, and mortality become more visible, wholly real. The warmth and joy of the season coexist with the deeply melancholic, undoubtedly aided by the seasonal climate, though not contingent upon it – my acquaintances on the other side of the equator have similar experiences. The awareness of loss and finitude is heightened precisely because the suspension of ordinary time allows these truths to surface. In this sense, Christmas exemplifies what Heidegger calls being-toward-death. This should not be seen as a purely morbid reflection, but as an awakening to the temporality and value of our finite existence. In this sense it can liberate us form the oppressive rushing nature of conventional time, and allow us, if only for a moment, to just be.

Ok, now you can pull the cracker.

…

When doing my undergraduate, I turned down an elective Heidegger module. It seemed dense and opaque and honestly, forgive me – boring. I regret that now, though I have had plenty of time to catch up. And, as I write these words, I realise that if I had had to sit through 6 months of lectures, tutor sessions, essays and exams on the man and his work, it may have turned me off his work forever. So perhaps it is, as most blessing appear to be, heavily disguised, cloaked and hiding in the shadows – always watching, though, of that we can all be sure.

I suppose what interest me most is the psychology of time. How, despite being everywhere, inescapable, it seems to interact with each of us differently. Yes, time is ultimately in control, and we will all die one day (and this is a good thing), but we can also manipulate time, not in a sneaky, disrespectful manner, but in an empowering one.

By structuring our days, cultivating habits, building a meaningful future, or simply being present in a moment, we stretch it, slow it, or intensify it. Memory and anticipation allow us to live beyond the ticking of the clock, to inhabit the past and future within the present. In this way, time is not just a measuring tape for our mortality, it’s a great big canvas for life.

So, do not piss it (I’ll leave the reader to decide if this God is male or female coded) off; he is a vengeful god. Respect it, live in harmony with it, pay your obligations to it and, most of all, don’t think about it too much.

Merry Christmas, I hope it’s a good one for you.

Photo by: Gary Spears