Thanksgiving is a relatively brief holiday interval. Per Post #909, that introduced a short-lived artifact in the data that looked like this:
When that arrived in the data, my reaction was a) shock, and b) a sincere hope that this was some transient effect of Thanksgiving. Which it in fact turned out to be.
The year-end holidays are a longer holiday period. A lot of people take the entire last week of the year off, and then some. And of late, we’re now seeing something that I sincerely hope is the Christmas/New Year’s analog of the Thanksgiving data blip.
And as with Thanksgiving, all I can say at this point is that I sure hope that’s just some transient impact of the holidays. Not quite as crisp as the Thanksgiving artifact. Probably not quite as short-lived. But I sure hope that’s what it is.
And I now see that the NY Times has addressed this issue in detail.
Guess we’ll know one way or the other in a few days.
