The city ceases to be a snarling metropolis, an aggregation of infrastructure deficits, and becomes an assemblage of local communities, in which there is room to breathe and time to stop and say hello.
For a start, there's the traffic - or rather the unfamiliar lack of it. When two or more Aucklanders get together, the conversation inevitably turns to how bad the traffic is. But in these long days, there isn't any.
The fact that parents aren't driving their kids to school means the roads are half-cleared anyway (I've often wondered whether making everyone send their kids to the local school wouldn't be a much cheaper solution to Auckland's traffic woes than building all these new roads), but when they all bugger off to the beach, it clears the other half. And those of us left behind exult in the unfamiliar sense of space.
On holiday highways, it's mayhem, all nose-to-tail queues, whether you're heading away from the city or back to it. But the city-dweller knows what it is to have whole clear lanes ahead, and to see only two or three cars at each set of lights.
Away from the main roads, the city becomes a foreign country. In the suburbs, cars slumber at crowded kerbs and on the grass verges wheelie bins, uncollected by their absent owners, gape at the cloudless sky.
The schools are silent, except for kids playing tennis across drooping nets on asphalt courts or booting footballs into imaginary goals on classroom-block walls. Meanwhile, road crews take advantage of low traffic volumes to close off half streets or whole ones and get a bit of work done.
The malls may be crowded with people spending money they don't have on stuff they don't need just because it's half-price, but on the streets, good sense reigns. The closed-up shops are still frozen in their Christmas poses, their window displays frosted with snowflakes and sleighs. Printed notices thank customers for their "support" (is that the modern age's most overused word?) over the past year.
In the shops that are open, no one's taking anything too seriously. On the pavement outside my local butcher's on December 29 was a painted sign advertising that they were closing at 2pm on Christmas Eve. "Fair warning," I said. "361 days."
He smiled as he bagged my sausages. "Yeah, I saw someone had taken that out and I couldn't be bothered bringing it back in."
Even in the little Asian enclaves, such as the one in the Balmoral shops, the shopkeepers and restaurant owners have resigned themselves to the inevitable, abandoning the 365-day service ethos of their countries of origin. The doors are locked and the shutters rolled down, though my favourite yum cha place up the road is as busy as always.
The Queen St valley is practically deserted, except for small clumps of tourists taking photos of the Civic or the Sky Tower on their smartphones. Someone will have told them why it's so quiet.
The English satirist Clement Freud, asked his opinion of New Zealand, famously said, "I find it hard to say, because when I was there it seemed to be shut". He wouldn't think that now, unless, perhaps, he showed up in Auckland in the last days of the old year or the first days of the new.
If you have just crawled back to work this week, I hope you had a good break. Trust me when I say we had a cracker.
