The days between Christmas and New Year’s often slip out of focus. You wake up unsure what day it is, sometimes not even in your own bed. Meals blur together, and the usual rhythms of work and life fade. Psychologists say this isn’t just holiday haze or too many carbs; it’s a form of temporal liminality, a transitional period when routines dissolve, and the brain loses the cues it uses to track time.
While this phenomenon usually refers to time and transition, temporal liminality can also apply to physical spaces. For instance, a trend of backrooms took to social media, with users pointing to various physical spaces that conveyed a dreamlike sense of timelessness and, sometimes, eeriness.
How liminality took shape
The concept of liminality gained prominence in the 1900s, with French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep introducing it in his book, “The Rites of Passage,” in which he explored ceremonies from birth rituals and weddings to seasonal festivals and funerals across cultures.
He described liminality as the middle stage of a rite of passage, when an individual leaves one state but has not yet entered the next. The word comes from Latin “limen,” meaning “threshold.” Van Gennep identified three stages within these rites: separation, liminality (or transition) and reintegration.
Decades later, in the 1960s, anthropologist Victor Turner expanded on Van Gennep’s concept, broadening its application to the social and psychological aspects of transitions between stages in which normal routines and identities loosen. Turner is often credited with popularizing the term.
How liminality plays out in everyday life
While Van Gennep and Turner largely focused on liminality in relevance to ritual transitions, holiday downtime isn’t much different. The days after Christmas also behave like a liminal space: work schedules drift, routines fall apart, but most importantly, people move through time without the same anchors that normally shape the day.
Identities shift, too. As many spend more time with family during the holiday season, work and school identities loosen, and family roles intensify. A manager, parent or student is suddenly a host, a sibling, or a son or daughter advocating for their attendance at the adults’ table.
Travel also heightens this sensation as it disrupts familiarity cues that the brain depends on, especially for those returning to their childhood bedrooms or, even weirder, their partner’s.
Feeling out of place during this period isn’t a signal of inauthenticity, but rather, it’s a time when people temporarily experience relaxed social structures and occupy roles that may not align with their everyday selves.
Why time feels distorted
With routines, environments and identities up in the air, the brain loses many critical internal markers that it relies on to structure time.
According to the authors of a study on the subjective interpretation of time, “repeated stimuli typically have shorter apparent duration than novel stimuli,” meaning that when the brain is experiencing something new or out of routine, time feels longer, whereas time spent in one’s normal routine can feel shorter.
Psychologists say our sense of time is heavily dependent on repetition, predictability, and context – all of which collapse during the post‑Christmas downtime. Without these anchors, the brain struggles to orient itself, making days feel slower, blurrier or even interchangeable when recalling events and interactions.
The drift of time between Christmas and New Year’s isn’t experienced in a vacuum; it’s a shared, predictable cognitive response to a moment when life briefly loses its familiar shape.
The brain begins to find its familiar cadence as the holidays end and people return to their anchors: consistent wake-up times, commutes and other predictable tasks. That’s the beauty of liminality – it’s meant to pass.
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