I’ve written many times on this blog over the years about the notion of Christmas as a bittersweet holiday. If you live in America, you are flooded with messages of materialism and familial merrymaking. You are told, through commercials and TV shows and the news, that you ought to be spending money on presents and gathering with your family in a warm glow of devoted love.
But sometimes these things are out of reach. Some of us struggle with money. Some have problems with their family and friends. A traditional Christmas is not their fate.
And then, a week later, here comes the New Year. A time to look back at our achievements and failures. A night when we’re supposed to carouse and revel.
But I tend to look on New Year’s Eve as an opportunity. It’s the dawning of a new day. Do not linger too much on yesterday; enjoy today to its fullest, look forward to the horizon of tomorrow.
Resolutions can be an attempt to list your failures and make a to-do list of corrections and penance. Instead, why not look to the coming year as a fresh start?
I’ve been reading Ella Wheeler Wilcox‘s poems about new years. One in particular seems applicable here. One stanza goes:
For the world is for ever improving,
All the past is not worth one to-day,
And whatever deserves our true loving,
Is stronger than death or decay.
Old love, was it wasted devotion?
Old friends, were they weak or untrue?
Well, let them sink there in mid-ocean,
And gaily sail on to the new.
As I do every year, I’m posting Dan Wilson‘s 2003 song “What a Year for a New Year,” one of the perfect things with which to mark this day. From 2007, here’s Regina Spektor’s "My Dear Acquaintance (Happy New Year)," which also can offer solace.
Dan Wilson – What a Year for a New Year
Regina Spektor – My Dear Acquaintance (Happy New Year) — BUY