We’ve reached the point in the 2023 calendar where most holiday plans have been completed. My flight back home to California was booked months ago, and the family unit enjoyed bountiful dinner reservations for Christmas Eve, and Christmas Eve Eve, respectively. (Yakitori and Mediterranean, if you’re curious.) A few other nights were designated for bar crawls with my dwindling network of high school friends, and the big day itself was blessed with a FaceTime call or two with loved ones who savored the year’s end elsewhere in the country. The pageantry was delightful, soul-filling, and almost entirely wholesome, as it is every Christmas.
However, if I’m being honest, what I always most look forward to each season isn’t the charmed, main-event rituals of Dec. 24 and 25. No, instead I have my eyes on the week after Christmas: Dec. 26, 27, 28, and 29, where time has no meaning, nothing is forbidden, and every sin—sloth, gluttony, lust—is a virtue.
That week is the best. Those mushy, languid afternoons after Christmas haven’t been designated with a colloquial name, but lately, I’ve been referring to them as “Feral Week.” Generally, Feral Week starts at the exact moment you have completed all of your familial yuletide traditions and have downshifted into a glorious neutral. Midnight Mass has been consummated; same with the strained salutations with ancillary aunts and cousins who may as well be from a different planet. There is no more serious money to spend, and the fruits of your paycheck have already been plundered from stockings, or lay unwrapped under the tree. The last laborious meals of the season—turkey, ham, perfectly crimped mincemeat pies, whatever—have already been cooked and consumed. All that’s left to do is sit around in sedentary stasis, waiting for civilization to click back into gear after the new year.
That means my itinerary for Feral Week is decadent and depraved. I use this special time of year to get back in touch with my worst, baseline indulgences, and I encourage you to do the same. I might play video games in my pajamas from sunup to sundown without absorbing a single ray of natural light. Or maybe I’ll read an entire book while soaking in the bath and sipping on a double gin-and-tonic. Perhaps I’ll even eat an enormous weed gummy and slip into a wondrous, nonverbal stupor—digging my fingers into the couch cushions to avoid floating out of Earth’s gravitational pull—while watching, I don’t know, Hader-era SNL highlights on YouTube for hours on end. Of course, all of these degeneracies will be paired with the exact same carne asada burrito—extra guacamole, add sour cream—that I intend to order daily from the counter-service Mexican restaurant down the street. The world is your oyster, baby. Feral Week means never having to say you’re sorry.
It should be said that not everyone has this privilege. A huge swath of the American workforce—retail workers, EMTs, airline pilots—aren’t blessed with the same temporal lull in the week after Christmas. The supply chain churns onward, and unfortunately some folks need to man it. (That said, if Joe Biden ran on a platform guaranteeing vacation breaks for everyone in America during the last few days of the calendar, essentially powering down the nation into total hibernation, I’m convinced he would receive 80 percent of the popular vote.) However, I—like many of you—have a job that allows for some institutional senioritis at the end of the year. Many people will use up the last of their vacation days to sop up the 2023 spillover, and the ones who don’t will be operating in twilight consciousness, barely clocked in, coasting on sublime inertia, cracking open a beer at a quarter past noon.
In any other context, this would be grounds for dismissal. But during Feral Week, you can be confident that your boss is probably doing the exact same thing—that’s what makes this time of year so magical. Christmas falls on a Monday this year, which means that everyone will spend the following Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday breaking the rules in small, dignified, and uniquely human ways—all of us seeing what we can get away with within the stuffy channels of an ostensible “work week.” At its best, doing this reminds us how we’d organize our lives if mortgages, pay stubs, and a functioning interdependent global economy were no issue. You will remember that a formless Tuesday afternoon is—in electrifying truth—one of the finite segments of our brilliant existences, rich with enormous opportunity. How shall we seize the day? That carne asada burrito isn’t going to eat itself.
And then, a few mornings later, we’ll all submerge into the cold water of January, where we will regain decorum. There won’t be any excuses to go AWOL anymore, so regrettably, my dawn-to-dusk gaming sessions shall be put on hold. This is for the best. I don’t want to live in a perpetual state of Feral Week, because despite all my animal tendencies, I do enjoy the exchange of goods and services that add up into a social contract. That means I will be prepared to go back to work and do my job, at full capacity, at the very moment the clock strikes 9 on Jan. 2.
But by the time December rolls around in 2024, you better believe that I’ll have built up enough pressure that can only be relieved by the sweet embrace of Feral Week. Eleven months of professional and personal obligations, and then seven days of debauched chaos, as God intended. After all, Christmas is about remembering the important things in life: your family, your friends, your faith, and your transcendent, slovenly self.
