A client emailed me on Tuesday to ask why Thursday's newsletter was still sitting in draft. I told her it was sitting in draft because it was Thursday, December 23rd, and the people on that list were going to be standing in a Fred Meyer checkout line holding a bag of ice and someone else's wine order.
She said the calendar said publish.
The calendar always says publish. The calendar was built in August by a person who had never once thought about the week between the office party and New Year's Eve, and the calendar does not know that half the list has already set an out of office.
Open rates in the last two weeks of December fall off a shelf. Everyone in email marketing knows this and almost nobody plans for it, because the content calendar is a production artifact and production artifacts want to be fed. Skipping a send feels like failure. It is not failure. It is arithmetic.
Publishing into an empty room is not consistency, it is expense, and the cost is paid in the one thing you cannot buy back: your audience's willingness to open the next one.
Here is the part that gets lost. Attention is not a flat resource you spend evenly across fifty-two weeks. It has a shape. Every send you push out into a dead week trains a small percentage of your list to scroll past your name, and that habit does not politely expire on January 3rd. You are borrowing against February.
So do one of three things with this week. One, skip it, and say so out loud in the previous send, because "we'll see you January 6th" is itself a small act of respect that people notice. Two, send something that is genuinely built for the week, short, human, no offer, no urgency, the kind of thing Salt & Straw does well when they stop selling and just talk about the year. Three, ship the piece you have been too busy to make properly, the long one, the one with no news peg, and let it sit in the archive where people will find it in March.
What you should not do is take your normal Thursday format, swap in a wreath, and call it seasonal.
Skipping a send feels like failure. It is not failure. It is arithmetic.
I told the client we would send on the 6th. She agreed faster than I expected, which usually means someone had wanted permission.
I am writing this from my apartment with the radiator ticking and Truffles asleep on the keyboard tray, which is the only place in the room he is not supposed to be. Barnaby is watching the rain. Neither of them has opened a single email all year and both seem fine.