Between christmas and the new year
These days always feel strange: less structure, fewer calls, more noise in my head than in my calendar.
December 29 is never an easy day. There are only two days left in the year, routines fall apart, and most people are either out of office or pretending not to be. Client calls drop to a minimum. I don’t mind it — but it still stresses me out more than I’d like to admit.
I tried to compress work into the morning and over lunch before heading to the circus with my kids. Work meant checking urgent performance marketing numbers. One dashboard hadn’t updated since Christmas. Annoying, but not operationally critical. What bothered me more was that I was the one noticing it — even though there are entire teams who could have caught this days earlier.
December numbers are still strong for service-driven companies. Non-traditional gifts and mid-priced consumer goods, at least in my portfolio, struggled more. That pattern isn’t new.
Most people would say “it’s tough out there.” I see it a bit differently. A lot of stress comes from unrealistic expectations — especially the belief that demand is unlimited. In most cases, it’s not a marketing problem. It’s product-market fit, or the fact that brands didn’t set themselves up early enough in the year to benefit from the holiday season.
These days between Christmas and New Year are odd and heavy. Today was one of those days.
The circus, though, was fantastic.
We should do that more often.