The turning of the year
Aaaaand here we are again. In just over 24 hours human beings will usher in yet another year, the fireworks will go off (or whatever method of celebration is locally pursued), people will laugh and scream and kiss and shout “Happy New Year”. The next day dumpsters will be full of empty champagne bottles, spent streamers, clumped confetti, old calendars. And we will have a new date to put on our checks, on our correspondence… on our lives.
It’s a time for looking back as much as for looking ahead.
That pic, up there? That’s a park in the city where I was born. Those are the earliest memories I have of Decembers, the crisp days on sun and snow, the sparkle and glow of snow under haloes of street lights and strings of holiday lights out where the sellers of cards and tinsel had their tables on the sidewals of the old city, standing behind them while their breath steamed from their lips and while they hopped up and down from one foot to the other clapping mittened hands together for warmth, the way snow crunched underfoot when I walked upon it with my small hand in that of a parent or a grandparent, hurrying hither and yon on end-of-year errands of one sort of another. Those were the days I had a bedtime, and staying up to midnight was an adventure, and New Year’s Eve was something big and magical that I was allowed to stay up for and await even when my eyelids were at half mast and I was yawning mightily – but it was NEW YEAR, and I was part of the family which had gathered together to greet it.
I lost a couple of decades of my life to living in the “wrong” hemisphere, where December was full summer, where New Year parties were barbeques on the beach, and I NEVER accepted that – some part of me, deep inside, rebelled at the wrongness of it all, because if you look at almost ANY remotely “traditional” Christmas card (yes, even those sent in Australia or South Africa) it will show you the snow and the cold legacy of my own childhood. Yes, I realise how Eurocentric this all makes me sound – but sue me, I grew up there, and to me that was the right and proper way, and I could never ever shake that. The first “Real” winter I spent back in the proper hemisphere, dressed in a manner I deemed fit for the season (sweaters and gloves and boots and scarves and woolly hats) and looking at the bare branches of winter outside, watching the first fat flakes of snow falling, I cried. I was somehow deeply, viscerally, HAPPY and all was right with the world once again.
I need these long cold nights at the turning of the year, when I lay my head on my pillow and watch the winter moon rise into the sky through my bedroom window. I need them to recharge, to think, to remember, to gather the strength for the things to come which will be sent to try me (and some will. Some always come. That is the way of the world, and ever has been).
Tomorrow night, I will rip the last leaf out of the old calendar, and we will start again. Anew. Clean slate. Fresh new January 1.
Come in, 2012. The house is warm. There will be mulled cider. There will be quiet plans made by and beside the people I love most in the world.
May the New Year come gently to all of you out there, and may it treat you well
