Not a Creature Was Stirring (until this morning): VIX and the Week Before Christmas

The index was recently up 5.5% at 16.30. It appears that today's 15.40 low is the low for the year.
From VIX and More:

I guess I should not be surprised that a VIX of 15.45 – the lowest since July 2007 – has all manner of pundits scrambling to pull some sort of explanation out of a hat and weave it into their favorite bullish or bearish forecast for the markets.

In fact, the new low in the VIX is not a big deal, at least during this time of the year. I have talked about this before on a number of occasions, including in VIX Holiday Crush and earlier this week in Chart of the Week: Historical Volatility Plummets in Seasonal Swoon. Call it the holiday effect or calendar reversion, but when the VIX’s 30-day window includes two holidays and two additional historically slow days in advance of the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, volatility has a tendency to take a vacation.

How strong is the tendency toward a low VIX? Well, consider that in five of the last eight years, the annual low in the VIX fell during the week leading up to Christmas. Last year, some may recall that the VIX made its annual low on Christmas Eve. Back in 2004, the VIX had its low for the year on December 23^rd; and in both 2003 and 2006, the VIX bottomed out for the year on December 18^th. Today’s low makes it five pre-Christmas bottoms in eight years....MORE

The index has made fools of the call buyers and I for one do not feel sufficiently lulled into my usual false sense of complacency to play the long game yet.
On to my favorite volatility carol:

Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,
Alles schläft; einsam wacht
Nur das traute hochheilige Paar.
Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar,
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh!
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh!