Are there better times to mark the new year?
This is it. The final credits on the year are rolling. Some of us might feel relief — “2018 can’t come soon enough.” Some might feel cosy nostalgia — “Do you remember …” Some might focus on the future — anticipating the events of the evening or looking forward to opportunities in the new year.
But whether your evening plans include a tux or a shirt untucked, tonight represents endings and beginnings.
Our society invests so much in that concept.
We’ve taken one regular winter night — a night as cold and dark but not quite as long as the ones before. We’ve added a few accidents of history, a couple of festivals on either side (and the resulting indigestion felt by some old white guys in red and white robes debating the European calendar many years ago) and a whole lot of marketing through the centuries, and voilà! What are you doing New Year’s Eve?
A cold, dark, long northern-hemisphere night — one of many — has taken on glittery significance, burnished with tradition and sparkling with expectation. This otherwise ordinary night has become a shining knight guarding the threshold between one year and the next.
Why Dec. 31? Why not any other night? Why not, for example, the night that occurs one week earlier? What we call Dec. 24 at least has religious significance for much of western culture through the past couple of thousand years. Despite the historical precision of that significance being debatable, it, too, symbolizes endings and beginnings.
Why not the winter solstice? Dec. 21 at least has the astronomical distinction of being the northern hemisphere’s longest night during the Earth’s journey around the Sun. Having observed that some tens of thousands of years ago, our homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis ancestors might well have turned to each other over their early European fire pits and said: “Well, that’s over. Things are eventually going to get better now. Pass the roast auroch.”
Which leads us to the question of why we celebrate the eventual end of winter when winter’s worst is still to come.
Why not start the new year at the March equinox? At least things really are improving then. Northern landscapes are losing their winter pall (well, maybe not Manitoba). The days are demonstrably longer and warmer. Plants are turning over new leaves — or at least beginning to get ready to maybe bud new leaves.
And you know what that means? It’s mean a promise of fresh food and an end to the winter’s scurvy.
Now, that’s a new beginning worth celebrating.
The Eastern calendar better aligns with such natural signals. Although arbitrary in its own way, the lunar new year occurs after the very worst of winter has passed. Indeed, in many countries where the lunar calendar rules, the growing season is already underway when the year turns over.
But if we prefer to continue acknowledging western religious influence, there’s a ready-made springtime festival that anticipates sorry endings, then promising beginnings. In fact, the December holiday season — most especially New Year’s Eve — is not so different from Carnival.
Tonight, we feast, because tomorrow (and the next month), we’ll be eating watery gruel. Tonight, we make merry, because as of tomorrow, we have to reconcile our year-end accounts.
OK, I get it. When things are dark and cold and about as miserable as they can get, you might as well laugh as cry.
Throwing a party with lots of lights, music and fancy pants helps hold back the dark, no matter where or when you live or what circumstances you live in.
In both seasons’ cases, we celebrate the end with a brief period of light and sparkle, knowing that long, dark, hard days of toil follow when we’ll swap the tuxes and the frivolous frilly shirts for restraint. After this big blowout, this Boxing Week bankaccount clearance, this carnival of excess, this First World gorging on food, drink, colour and activity, we’ll turn over our new leaves.
Starting tomorrow — Wednesday at the latest — we’ll become leaner, faster, kinder, less stressed, and do more and do it better. Oh, and we’ll cut the fat, too.
Happy New Year.