My coinage (using the medical adjective internatal ‘between births’) for the period between the birth of Jesus (conventionally celebrated on December 25th) and the birth of the Gregorian-calendar New Year (January 1st). There’s no standard term in English for this period, though Twixmas (not recognized in any lexicography-based dictionary) has been used in some commercial settings, apparently to refer to a new shopping season; it seems to be commonly limited to December 27th – 30th (excluding Boxing Day).
Now, in the New Yorker‘s January 1 & 8, 2024, issue, cartoonist Emily Flake has contributed a graphic essay entitled “Tips for Filling the Dead Week Between Christmas and New Year’s”, in which she falls back on referring to this often aimless period as a dead week, a week out of ordinary life. Her suggestions largely embrace this deadness, in its various forms. Meanwhile, if you look at the media’s preoccupations this week, you’ll been inclined to think of it as the days of retrospection, since the media are much taken with reviews of the news events of the year that’s winding down, memorials to the notable people who died during the year, and catalogues of the Best of the Year in many categories (books, movies, tv shows, songs, whatever).
(There’s a Page on this blog — here — about my postings on Emily Flake’s work.)
December 29, 2023 at 2:10 pm |
Jeffrey Goldberg commenting on Facebook:
There are also variants with Thanksgiving and Christmas. None of them treated in the Quote Investigator’s database, alas.