Seasonal Entanglement: A Holiday Field Guide to Spooky Connections (and the One Force We Keep)

Every December, the world runs the same experiment: billions of humans synchronize travel, spending, rituals, and old emotional software, then act surprised when the results are volatile.

The numbers alone look like a blockbuster.

AAA projects 122.4 million Americans traveling 50+ miles between Dec 20, 2025 and Jan 1, 2026, a new year-end record. AAA Newsroom TSA projects screening 44.3 million travelers from Dec 19, 2025 to Jan 4, 2026, with the peak day forecast around 2.86 million screenings on Sunday, Dec 28. PR Newswire The National Retail Federation forecasts U.S. holiday sales of $1.01 to $1.02 trillion, up 3.7% to 4.2% over 2024. National Retail Federation GivingTuesday 2025 estimates $4.0B donated in the U.S. by 38.1 million participants. GivingTuesday USPS marked its 9 billionthholiday-season package and reported 9.3+ billion deliveries as of Dec 22. CT Insider

That is an astonishing amount of motion, money, and meaning-making packed into a few cold weeks.

Now for the educated theft.

I’m going to borrow a word from quantum physics, not because your situationship is literally a Bell pair, but because the metaphor has teeth: the holidays increase coupling, and coupling increases correlation. Your inner state becomes less independent of other people’s outcomes. One text changes the day. One silence changes the month. One name across a dinner table collapses your entire wavefunction into “I’m fine,” delivered with Oscar-caliber timing.

Act I: The real science, before the metaphor starts drinking

Quantum entanglement is not vibes. It’s a specific kind of correlation between quantum systems so strong that classical explanations fail. It’s the reason the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics went to experiments that established Bell-inequality violations and helped build the foundations of quantum information science. NobelPrize.org

We’ve distributed entanglement across distances that sound like a Christopher Nolan pitch meeting. The Micius satellite experiment demonstrated entangled photon pairs delivered to two ground stations separated by 1203 km. Science

And it’s not just cinematic. In the less glamorous, more impressive world of telecom infrastructure, researchers have shown you can distribute entangled photons through real metropolitan fiber while coexisting with classical internet traffic. One large-scale field effort in Berlin reports continuous multiday operation with entanglement fidelities up to ~99%, less than 1% downtime, and dynamically selectable paths up to 82 km, with fidelity still reported above 92% on those longer routes. arXiv+1

Here’s the punchline that matters for humans too: entanglement is fragile because the universe is noisy. Decoherence is the invisible stagehand who walks on mid-scene and removes your props because you left them unattended in reality.

Which brings us to Paul Dirac, patron saint of the clean line, the raised eyebrow, and the kind of elegance that makes other physicists resent you just a little.

Dirac’s famous moral was: it is “more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.” MacTutor History of MathematicsIt’s a dangerous sentence and a useful one. Beauty isn’t truth, but it can be a compass when the map is too large to read.

The holidays are when most people do Dirac backwards: we choose a beautiful story first, then try to force reality to match it. Hence the annual spike in airport lines and emotional plot holes.

Act II: December as a correlation engine

In human terms, December turns up the coupling constants.

More interactions. More reconnections. More forced proximity. More rituals. More chances for meaning to land, or miss, or arrive late wearing the cologne of someone you don’t trust.

And yes, the system runs hot. The American Psychiatric Association reports 41% of U.S. adults anticipate more holiday stress than last year, with 49% among ages 18 to 34. Psychiatry The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory notes that about half of U.S. adults report experiencing loneliness, with some of the highest rates among young adults. HHS

So “seasonal entanglement” is not purely cozy. It’s an amplifier. It boosts connection and it boosts absence. It boosts generosity and it boosts grief. It boosts your odds of watching Casablanca at 1 a.m. and realizing adulthood is mostly choosing what you can live with, then pretending you chose it on purpose.

This is where the thespian part sneaks in. Holidays are theatre: entrances and exits, costumes and lighting, the same lines spoken every year with slightly different subtext. Some people are method actors. Some are excellent understudies. A few are still auditioning for roles that were never offered.

Act III: Love as the only thing that keeps doing work

Here’s the Interstellar move, translated into something you can say in a room full of scientists without getting politely exiled.

Love is not “energy” in the strict physics sense. It’s not a conserved quantity with units. No instrument will report “3.2 joules of devotion” because you finally apologized without a follow-up argument.

But love does behave like something that survives its source, because it persists in other people as information, memory, changed behavior, and choices that outlive the chooser. It continues to do work after the sender is gone. It propagates through time, which is a dimension we actually inhabit.

If love “crosses dimensions,” it crosses the only one that reliably matters: the boundary between one nervous system and another, and then the boundary between “then” and “now.”

That is why this season hits so hard. The holiday surge forces contact. Contact forces reckoning. Reckoning forces meaning. Even if you pretend you’re above it, your body still keeps score.

Emerson nailed the social physics of it with a single clean line: “All mankind love a lover.” Ralph Waldo EmersonHis point isn’t sentimental. It’s observational. A visible bond between two people makes strangers feel less like strangers. A glance, a small loyalty, a tenderness that isn’t performative, and the room warms. Civility appears. People soften.

That’s not quantum mechanics. That’s the older, harder science of being human in a crowded universe.

The conclusion, with minimal nonsense

You can’t control the whole network. You can control your coupling.

Pick a few correlations worth sustaining. Put attention where it changes outcomes. Reduce noise where it only performs closeness. Be direct. Be kind. Don’t confuse cynicism with intelligence. And if you love someone, say it like you mean it, not like you’re negotiating a merger.

Because the real holiday miracle is not that we travel 122.4 million times or spend $1.01 trillion or ship 9 billionpackages. AAA Newsroom+2National Retail Federation+2 It’s that, despite the static, we still manage to transmit the signal.

Love may not be measurable energy in the physicist’s ledger, but it is the only force most of us recognize that keeps doing work after we’re gone, across distance, across time, across every dimension that actually hurts.

And yes, that’s profoundly comforting.

Also inconvenient (Depending on who you're with). Which is how you know it’s real.

I'm more than happy with this years results and optimistic of the events that await in 2026.

About the author: Eduardo “Eddie” Ibanez is a scientist and technology founder who writes about applied physics, AI, and the human systems we pretend are rational. His work has appeared in peer-reviewed venues, and he’s especially interested in how information, connection, and risk behave in noisy environments.