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Seasonal Cyclicality: From Santa Claus Rally to January Effect

Posted December 25, 2007

"Groundhog Season culminates in Christmas, which is the really the one day of the year when you don’t mind that you’ve done it all before exactly alike. And it finds its resounding finish on New Year’s Eve." — J. Christoph Amberger 

by J. Christoph Amberger

Baltimore — (TFN): Bill Murray is an actor I don’t care for.  There isn’t a movie of his that I would voluntarily watch again… except maybe for Groundhog Day.

In this movie, he plays a weatherman with all the unpleasant characteristics attributed to human males. He is forced to relive a single day over and over again until he understands that, to get the girl, his eyes must turn into moist luminous orbs, he enjoys musical theater and has divested himself of everything that makes him annoyingly and abrasively unique and male.

It’s Dances with Squirrels all over again. Hold the nuts.

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The weeks before the holidays remind me of Groundhog Day. In fact, I like to consider the whole last half of December Groundhog Season:

There is the annual Winter Solstice concert we usually attend. The three (by now middle-aged) musicians are considered virtuosi in their respective instruments and regularly receive standing ovations at the end. But they’ve been playing the same tunes for the same crowd for the past decade and a half. And since they only convene for the December concert, they really haven’t added a single new arrangement in that period.

I look around the concert hall and can see faces I’ve been seeing for years. Only older. Greyer. Less lively.

Which is my introduction into the beginning of the holiday party element of Groundhog Season.

There is the shindig thrown by our corporate mother ship, Agora, Inc. It’s usually a splendid affair, held in a festive downtown Baltimore location, with hundreds and hundreds of colleagues and, in true Christmas fashion, the Ghosts of Colleagues Past.

The food is good, the company eclectic and the music as loud as required for a decent party. Female colleagues appear in elaborate dresses and sophisticated hairdos, the latter acquired during mysterious female bonding rituals in the morning. As the hour progresses, I’m told that there even is dancing involved.

The time is spent shaking the hands of old acquaintances, mutually assuring each other that we don’t know a tenth of the people present, and reminiscing about the days when the party involved an outing to the now defunct Baltimore Brewing Company restaurant. This is followed by a ritualistic exchange about the apparent youth of the new colleagues — and the grave realization that we’re getting too old for all the merriment that’s going on around us.

That is the highlight of Groundhog Season. It is followed up by various events given by friends and colleagues. Here, too, the food is excellent. Some are potlucks where every guest brings his or her trademark dish, year after year after year, to supplement the host’s culinary trademark offerings.

There may be only a handful of truly familiar faces at each event. Like tired swimmers hanging onto driftwood, you gravitate toward each other and allow the current to carry you into a social backwater, where you stand your legs into your belly, a glass in your hand, with comments on the offspring's school, music and sports exploits forming the well-worn grooves of conversation.

Groundhog Season culminates in Christmas, which is the really the one day of the year when you don’t mind that you’ve done it all before exactly alike. And it finds its resounding finish on New Year’s Eve, which we have celebrated in the company of three other couples with kids roughly the same age as our own, exactly the same way, since my oldest son was a baby.

But who's complaining. Your cyclical encounters during Groundhog Season remind you that everything has been running smoothly for yet another year and that most people will be there for next year’s edition, eating the same food and having the same conversations as this year.

You realize that repetition is the cornerstone of cyclicality, and cyclicality is the element that allows you to anticipate some aspects of the future with reasonable accuracy.

And as I turn to my charts and data feeds, there is a certain comfort in the fact that Groundhog Season is invariably followed by another cyclical event: The January Effect.

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Posted by J. Christoph Amberger · Filed Under American Life 

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