The week between Christmas and New Year's has traditionally been a very popular time for patients to schedule non-urgent procedures. Teachers and students are on break, patients who've met their deductibles for the year are scrambling to get in under the wire and there's built-in time to recover. A quirk in the calendar fueled the surge for demand in surgery this year: Both Christmas and New Year's Day fell on a Friday, creating long weekends, all the better for patients to recover from minor surgery without burning personal days at work.