How a Year Ends and Another Begins

The end of a year looms while another waits to begin.

For children, New Year begins on the first day of summer vacation.

For many adults, it’s the first (real) day of spring, when the breeze is warm, songbirds are singing, and green growth is everywhere. “The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land” (Song of Solomon 2:12).

As we enter the last decades of our own story—we won’t count which ones—New Year begins every morning.

Formally, it turns over on January First at the stroke of midnight. We’ll hear gunshots, honking, fireworks, and, in my younger days, cheering in New York’s Time Square as the golden ball announces the new year.

So many New Year’s Eves in so many homes over the years.

On Caroline Street, the first time Mom and Dad let us older kids stay up to see in the New Year.

In the same house, years later, when we let our two stay up until midnight.

Champagne or sparking water. Parties, with hooting and kissing. Home, with the TV on to Dick Clark and New York’s excited crowds. In apartments, on my own. In various houses in different States.

Each time, the old year was left behind with hope promised in the new.

Resolutions? I try not to make new ones at my age, but keep the basic health and kindness goals I’ve set myself.

Daily walks. More vegetables, less sugar. Stomping on the urge to snap back with sarcasm. More patience, kindness, acceptance, understanding. Tough goals, but worth the effort, no matter how many “just for today” beginnings they take.

Looking out a window on Caroline Street to a snowy January First, or a gray and cloudy day. Florida yards with live oaks and palmettos, where cardinals sing every morning and snow is a calendar scene (and missed).

Eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day. Buy a new broom and wait to sweep or clean house, since you don’t want to sweep away the year’s good luck. Hope a dark-haired man is the first to cross your doorway. My great-grandmother believed every one of those superstitions, and was careful to follow them, even inviting a dark-haired man she knew to knock on her door New Year’s Day.

I hope I remember to write the correct year on letters and bill payments.

In the ancient world, the new year began at different times. Mid-March in Mesopotamia, autumn equinox (September) in Egypt, and March First in ancient Rome until January First was chosen to honor the two-faced god of beginnings, Janus. Those Romans offered sacrifices and made resolutions.

I watched two versions of A Christmas Carol this year—George C Scott and Albert Finney’s musical, where he sings in his conversion the best way to begin the new year (music and words by Leslie Bricusse):

“I’ll begin again, I will build my life,
I will live to know that I’ve fulfilled my life.
I’ll begin today, throw away the past
And the future I build will be something that will last…”

There hasn’t been a New Year that those promises weren’t part of my intentions. Well, it’s never too late for this year, right?

Happy New Year to you all!

“I will start anew, I will make amends
And I will make quite certain
that this story ends
On a note of hope, on a strong Amen,
And I’ll thank the world and remember when
I was able to begin again.”