Signs and Visions

This time last year Hannelie and I decided to celebrate New Year by going out and sending off some  Chinese Lanterns. It was bitterly cold and the wind was high but we wanted to celebrate 2011, a year in which we finally tied the knot. The lanterns were a wedding gift from my father and sisters, who had written messages and drawn pictures on them. We walked out into the field behind our house in Durham in time, we thought, to light them as midnight approached.

Image by kamikoros.deviantart.com

The first lantern took 5 attempts to light. Our lighter was almost empty. H trudged home to bring a different one. We still couldn’t light the touch paper because the wind was too high. Even when we found a sheltered spot near the hedge, the paper just wouldn’t catch. When we finally lit it, the lantern seemed too heavy to fly properly and didn’t lift. We tried another, and then another and had the same problem. The last one caught fire and spluttered out on the ground. We went home, pretty discouraged. As we walked H broke the silence:

“is this a sign about the year ahead?”

I thought for a moment before replying:

“it doesn’t have to be. Some things aren’t omens, they just happen. We don’t have to claim it as a sign.”

Underneath I wasn’t so sure.

Which New Year?

As the Grinch is to Christmas, so am I to New Year. Yes, I am that person who will tell you that the New Year is just an arbitrary date unworthy of celebration – just an excuse to fill up some of the space after Christmas with vast amounts of Champagne, (false) hope in “a new start” (which usually seems to mean “new diet”) and annoying repetitions of either Auld Lang Syne or Abba’s “Happy New Year” (or both).

In my family we have never really celebrated at New Year. As children we went to bed as usual and woke up knowing that January had started. As we grew up, we sometimes stayed awake with our parents and watched the London fireworks on the BBC and drank an austere glass of champagne at midnight. In my last few years as a young adult I have variously spent New Year crying (2007/8, a long story), puking, sleeping and trying to light and set off those flying Chinese lanterns in the freezing wind with little success (last year.) The only good New Year I have had was in 2009/10 when I managed to actually be at a party I enjoyed with people I love. Here it was the company, and not the fact that it was New Year, that made me happy.

You could be forgiven for thinking that, like the Grinch, my shrivelled  heart must just be a few sizes too small to take in all that optimism, hope and goodwill. The Grinch, however, had some very good points about the falseness of a commercial Christmas and I have some doubts about the enforced cheeriness of the New Year. I think I just don’t get what is so special about it. And seemingly neither does anyone else I ask, at least not really. Yes it is a great excuse for a party, but as everyone knows, one does not wake up on the first of January a new creation with a fresh start. Rather one wakes up with a banging headache, mild depression, the sure knowledge that nothing has really changed, and a foolhardy plan to eat only lettuce leaves during the coldest month of the year or rearrange one’s garage.