The last day of the year is nearly here.
New Year’s Eve is my favorite holiday because it is the one day of the year when people come together regardless of nationality, religion, creed or culture, to celebrate together.
The sheer absurdity of New Year’s Eve is that we choose to celebrate an entirely contrived moment, created by assigning monumental importance on a particular time — midnight — in a particular place in our revolution around our sun — a few days after the winter solstice when Earth is on the far side of the sun from our galaxy’s center, just slightly above the galactic plane.
This completely arbitrary moment has been collectively chosen to delineate the mark of one year to the next, and it is our decision to imbue this moment with importance that gives it weight.
The upcoming Gregorian year 2016 is 7524 in the Byzantine calendar, 6766 in the Assyrian calendar, 5776 in the Hebrew calendar, 4712 in the Chinese calendar, 2769 an urbe condita, aka since the founding of the city of Rome, 2560 in the Buddhist calendar, 1437 in the Islamic calendar, Heisei 28 in Japan and 12016 in the Holocene calendar. These varied calendars do not agree on the year and many do not mark Jan. 1 as their start, yet the Gregorian calendar is the lingua franca of our modern dating system. Whatever other calendar a particular person may use, for the sake of commerce, conversation and convenience, a shopowner overlooking the Adaman Sea, a watchmaker in Mecca, an investment banker in Düsseldorf, a retiree in Sedona, a communist guerrilla in the Columbian hinterland and an Inuit fisherman in Iqaluit use the same calendar and recognize the collective transition from one year to the next.
Regardless of all these technicalities, all human beings have the same concept of a solar year, just as we do a day, and thus the changing of the new year is a profound moment for us as individuals.
The end of the calendar year allows us to reflect on all that’s happened in our last passage around our sun, the victories and losses, the deaths and births, the start of new enterprises and end of old empires.
As the year ends, we reflect on our loved ones, offering the lost a final reverence and remembering that our extended family, whether living across town, across the country or serving oversees, are celebrating the new year too.
New Year’s Eve also gives us a moment to remember that whether we speak English, Pitjantjatjara, Czech, Basque or Kutenai, whether we whisper prayers to Allah, Mother Earth, Vishnu, Yahweh, a pantheon or to no one, whether we elect a president, parliament or follow a king in Asia, Africa or North America, we are related kin, members of the same species celebrating one arbitrary moment together, remembering our past and hoping for a better future tomorrow.
Happy new year to you and yours.
