Happy New Year! (Again Again)

[purplerabbits]

 

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year) there are approximately umpty-ten days in the year which could count as New Year’s Day for some purposes, and that doesn’t even include days like the first day of the autumn term, which still seems like the start of a new year to me even though it’s thirty one years since I actually had term times, unless you count the start of adult education classes, and why the hell not? In fact since lots of people also count their birthdays as a kind of fresh start that technically makes a potential New Year’s day for every day of the year…

This profusion of fresh starts is especially handy, I find, when Everything is Poo and you need to turn over a new leaf asap. For practical purposes (since I personally only have one birthday a year) this can happen on:-

21st December: midwinter, the shortest day, and therefore the day when the light starts to come back. In practice it’s difficult to celebrate this as a New Year when there’s still Xmas to get through, but I do celebrate it...

1st January: the obvious one, and even more so since I’ve lived in Scotland. In my misspent youth I used to find the traditional Scottish holiday more appealing, but it still marks the date of ‘thank fuck winter holidays are over’ even when these days I’m more likely to be in bed as soon as the bloody fireworks shut the hell up.

3rd January: this being the day after the extra bank holiday we get up here to allow for Hogmanay hangovers. Certainly when I had a Real Job™ I was adamant that New Year resolutions did not kick in until I was back at work.

2nd February: this is a dubious one, as few modern pagans would call it a New Year’s Day as such, but my Imbolc ritual involves sweeping the house and opening the windows wide to greet the bloody freezing but technically spring air, so I have been known to count it as a fresh start. Some pagans treat it as a day for making promises about the year to come. My promises tend to evaporate as I shut the doors and windows until it’s actually warmer.

21st March: the spring equinox - now the days will be longer than the nights! Hurrah!

1st April: or whenever the start of the financial year is in your organisation. For some people this is more of a deal than others - e.g. if you are an accountant or more likely someone who doesn’t know if your job will be funded past this date…

1st May: the first day of summer, the day after the Beltane Fire Festival which I can sadly no longer go to. There is absolutely no reason to see this as a New Year, Celtic or otherwise, but then the more widely recognised  “Celtic New Year” is also pretty sketchy, so whatever.

There are no New Year’s Days in summer, because that would be silly.

1st September, or the start of term: as I said, it’s a nebulous concept when I don’t strictly have a term, and in Edinburgh the kids go back to school in August anyway, but I’m still stuck on the dates I knew as a child in Englandshire, and in any case you can’t have a new term until after your summer conventions and the end of the Edinburgh Festival, can you?

2nd October: it’s my birthday and I’ll call it a New Year if I want to.

1st November: the day after Samhain, and the start of the neo-pagan year. The idea of it being a “Celtic New Year” has little basis in fact, but it still counts for me this year as a day to start my personal accounts and generally pull myself together. Also the first day of Nanowrimo - so here I am, writing again and actually putting some words in a place where people can see them, so go me!