a new year

I hope you won't take it amiss if I write for a moment about the new year. It is a holiday that is oft-derided--'why are you celebrating it? what's the big deal?'--but a holiday which everyone knows about and generally agrees upon. There is definitely a new year and it is definitely not based in any one religion.

Other holidays in Christendom tend towards the religious and the false piety. Christmas pretends to celebrate the birth of the Christian savior; Thanksgiving is the time where we pretend to be thankful for all the stuff we aren't really thankful for. Easter, all the marginal Christians dust off their old religion and pretend to be pious. These are all holidays where most people are pretending to be something they are not.

The New Year is not religious. It is a time to reflect, to forget, to start afresh. Yes, you could do this any time--but why not devote some time for it? People think symbolically of time all the time. The month of August tends to be terrible for me over the past few years. September is usually a good month. Some years are wonderful years and some years are horrible, and sometimes you just need a different number in your calendar to look at and say 'well, that's all over, let's do something different.'

I realize there is an element of pretending to be someone else at certain New Year's parties. People wear masks, or sometimes costumes, or just dress up. I confess to never having been to such a party, so I'm no expert, but here is the thing about a masquerade or a costume party: people are not actually pretending to be someone else. If I dress up as Kurt Vonnegut, nobody thinks I am actually Kurt Vonnegut. I'm not trying to convince anybody. It's almost a mockery of the other holidays: at best I'm pretending to pretend to be someone else. No lies, no tricks. Just honesty.

Monitoring the New Year, you can try to Start The Year Off Right. Your first kiss of the year, first song, first meal. You can try to make sure things get off to a good start, be sure that new number in the calendar is representing something nice. Is it completely arbitrary? Sure. But what isn't? Humans make up symbols all the time. Doesn't make it meaningless.

Thanks for indulging me. I promise it won't happen often.