By Mary O’KEEFE

“Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house/Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.” 

This, as I am sure you all know, are the first lines in Clement Clarke Moore’s poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” 

According to a Columbia Magazine article titled “The Story Behind the Most Famous Christmas Poem of All,” Moore was  apparently a fairly serious man. He had finished first in his class at Columbia and later produced the first Hebrew lexicon in the U.S. He was a “serious” author who never intended for the poem he wrote for his six children to be one of the most popular Christmas stories in the world. 

As the story goes, during a gathering at Moore’s home everyone had sat down to hear a new poem that he had written. 

With that he started – “Twas the night before Christmas….” Can you imagine being there when Moore read this poem? I don’t know about you, but there have been more than a few times in my life when my breath was taken away by the reading of a poem or a performance on stage or screen. It brings me peace and honestly gives me hope for society.

Words are so powerful; they can make and break empires, lift someone up or crush dreams. 

When I think of the words that are being bandied about lately by so many, either online or in line at the grocery store, regarding civility I worry that we have crossed the point of no return. 

But there is another point of concern as well: the dwindling (with the ticking of every internet clock) of people’s attention span. One of the canaries in the coal mine is the microdrama.

“Microdramas exploded in Asia a few years ago but only recently have taken hold in Hollywood. They are shot quickly for tiny budgets – $150,000 to $200,000 for a feature-length film, which is then distributed in segments of two minutes or less. A series of cliffhangers leads to a paywall, prompting the viewer to sign up for an app – DramaBox, ReelShort, FlareFlow, for example – to watch the full story,” according to Variety.

Microdramas last anywhere from one to 10 minutes with the most common lasting about two minutes. 

The microdrama started in China on platforms similar to TikTok and they are becoming very popular. This new industry is catering to our ever-shrinking attention spans. I find myself watching a movie but then checking my phone …sometimes I even check Instagram … and then, before I know it, the movie is over and I can’t remember anything about it. And I am old and did not grow up with this technology. Imagine what is happening to the attention span of younger people as they follow numerous platformsat once.

Research has shown that over the past couple of decades people’s attention spans have shrunk in measurable ways. 

CV Cares and Prom Plus hosted a seminar on this very subject with therapist Jamie Given that was enlightening and frightening at the same time. 

In an article in American Psychological Association, Gloria Mark, Ph.D., chancellor’s professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, spoke about studies done on attention and how it has, and is, changing rapidly. 

“So we started measuring (attention spans) back in 2004 and at the time the measures that we used were stopwatches because that was the most precise thing we had. We would shadow people with stopwatches for every single activity they did. We would record the start time and the stop time. So you’re on a screen where you’re working in a Word doc. As soon as you get to that screen, we clicked ‘start time,’ [and as] soon as they turned away and checked email, we clicked ‘stop time’ for the Word document, ‘start time’ for the email. But fortunately sophisticated computer logging methods were developed and so of course we switched to those. So back in 2004 we found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes on average. 

“Throughout the years it became shorter. Around 2012 we found it to be 75 seconds. This is with logging techniques. This is an average. And then in the last five/ six years we found it to average about 47 seconds. Others have replicated this result within a few seconds. So it seems to be quite robust,” Mark stated in the interview.

Along with our shrinking attention span we are also, according to research, losing the ability to imagine. There was a time when kids, and adults, would stare off into space and allow their imagination to run freely … but now most have their eyes turned toward a screen.

“People seen as daydreamers are often dismissed as inefficient or infantile. The truth may be far different. Psychologist Jerome Singer proposed that ‘happy daydreamers’ drew on self-generated images, fantasies and interior monologues to plot their futures, amuse themselves and generate creative solutions for their challenges. Today, living in an environment full of distraction, some experts suggest that we should consider spending more time lingering in our daydreams. Rather than representing a lapse in attention, occasional mind-wandering could help us remember more effectively, solve problems more creatively and maintain greater mental health,” according to Psychology Today.

In 1822, when Moore first read “A Visit from St. Nicholas” Santa Claus was not that well known. He was a relatively new addition to the U.S., brought over by Dutch immigrants and known as “Sinterklaas.” But Moore imagined a different Santa Claus and created this poem for his kids that eventually would be shared with children around the world. That is what a healthy imagination can bring and what just the right words can do. 

I hope you all take a moment and revisit “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” 

Our weather will see the continuing of the warming trend of this week with temperatures in the high 70s to mid 70s. Sunday should be our coolest day with an expected temperature of 71 degrees but then it’s back up to mid to upper 70s into next week. 

It looks like there might be some rain in our forecast for the week of Christmas but that is so far off NOAA cannot be certain.

Normal temps for this time of year are in the mid 60s but we are dealing with La Niña – weather that is typically warmer and dryer than normal. So while the midwest is seeing a cold snap and getting out their heavy parkas, we are facing T-shirt weather.