1. How the Colonel became a Japanese Santa.

In the West, Christmas dinner is a slow-motion marathon of roasting meats and inevitable family debates over the consistency of the gravy. But in Japan, the holiday spirit comes in a cardboard bucket. Every December 24th, roughly 3.5 million families partake in a tradition known as Kurisumasu ni wa Kentakkii (Kentucky for Christmas). It is a logistical phenomenon where customers preorder their "Party Barrels" months in advance or brave two-hour queues just to secure a feast of Original Recipe chicken, strawberry shortcake, and even the occasional bottle of festive champagne.

In the early 1970s, Japan had no established Christmas customs, leaving a cultural vacuum that KFC’s first local manager, Takeshi Okawara, filled with a stroke of genius: if foreigners couldn't find turkey, fried chicken was the next best thing. He dressed the iconic Colonel Sanders statues in Santa suits (a look the Colonel still pulls off with surprising dignity) and rebranded fast food as a premium family experience. As we close out 2025, it's worth noting: the rituals we think are timeless often started with someone taking a shot on something new.

2. Gravity’s year-long commute.

Every New Year’s Eve, the Times Square ball takes a leisurely 60-second, 141-foot stroll down a flagpole to signal that we’ve successfully survived another trip around the sun. It’s a ritual that started in 1907 because New York City banned the New York Times from setting off their usual "building is on fire" level of rooftop fireworks. Needing a safer gimmick, the publisher repurposed a "time ball", a 19th-century maritime tool used by sailors to sync their chronometers, and accidentally created a global obsession. Today, that ball has evolved into a six-ton disco planet covered in 5,280 Waterford crystals, perched atop a building that is currently undergoing a $550 million makeover to include a museum and an observation deck for year-round ball-gazing.

But if a one-minute drop feels a bit brief for a 365-day wait, there is now a way to stretch out the suspense. Designer Brian Moore created the Infinite Ball Drop, a site that extrapolates that 60-second descent across the entire year. By calculating the ball's "height" relative to the calendar, the site shows that for most of the year, the ball is essentially drifting through the exosphere. It’s a beautifully absurd bit of digital art that reminds us that time is always "dropping," whether we’re wearing plastic 2026 glasses or just trying to remember what day of the week it is during the post-Christmas slump.

3. The serendipity of ceramic.

While most of us are spending the final days of the year navigating the cacophony of crowded malls or the high-pitched chaos of family gatherings, a quiet revolution in acoustics is happening at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris. Artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot has filled the museum’s massive Tadao Ando-designed rotunda with a 60-foot basin of water for an installation titled clinamen. Across this indoor sea, hundreds of white porcelain bowls drift on invisible currents, colliding with one another to create a shimmering, unpredictable chorus of ceramic chimes.

The name clinamen comes from ancient Epicurean physics, referring to the spontaneous "swerve" of atoms that allows for free will in a predictable universe. In an era where our lives are increasingly dictated by algorithmic precision and hyper-scheduled calendars, watching dishes bump into each other serves as a radical reminder of the beauty of the unplanned. Boursier-Mougenot describes the work as a "self-regulating organism," one that forces a sudden, contemplative deceleration on anyone who enters its orbit. There is a certain zen to be found in the idea that some of the most beautiful sounds in the world happen only when we let go of the steering wheel and allow things to simply happen naturally.