Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Friday, January 01, 2010

Happy New Year's Day to All

I want to wish everyone a happy New Year's Day. New Year's Day is seldom observed with any particular solemnity, unless you might go watch a parade. Some do. But that's about it. A parade.

New Year's Eve on the other hand, has its pomps and observances. People participate in that one en masse. You get all liquored up and make a lot of resolutions, then when the clock ticks over to eleven five-nine five-oh, countdown, pandemonium, kissing, more liquor and a round of auld lange syne. Then repeat selected elements until stupor and forgetfulness set in. The next day you wake up with a headache and nothing more to do in particular. You already wished everyone the happy of the holiday, midnight the night before.

Well I want to wish you all a happy New Year's Day. It doesn't matter too much, one day versus another. We group days into arbitrary strings and sets to keep everything tidy, and we set up certain points as milestones but really a new year begins every single day, and every day a decade ends. Every day a century ends. A century, any set of ten decades; a decade, any set of ten years. A year, any set of 365 days (in certain controversial cases, 366). Everyone knows all that - it's all arbitrary and agreed-upon, pure convention. Nothing mysterious. We set January first apart, so that when once again the sun sets and rises as it does, we can make it mean something more than just another day.

And so we can. We can make it mean anything we can.

Something to celebrate. If you live that way every day, then: always something to celebrate.

3 comments:

Sarah said...

Soooo ... you're saying we should all countdown to midnight, drink a bottle of champagne, make out with random strangers, pass out in some bushes in a cul-de-sac, and try to remember the previous night over a short stack at Waffle House ... every day?

dogimo said...

Nope, not really. This one's just a handful of observation with no real suggestions or action plan to go with it.

Certainly it sounds like your interp's a real "seize the day" type of proposition though!

Mel said...

This is kind of what I was trying to articulate on the phone to you but I didn’t really do it properly, I got sidetracked talking abut dead soldiers and Anzac day and then the mood just got morbid thanks to me!. Anyway, what I was trying to say is that almost all public holidays have some solemn origin, we need a day just for cutting loose for no reason.