We can blow our horns and clink our glasses, but nothing will change at midnight tonight. It’s cold today; it will be cold tomorrow. The turn of the year is just another arbitrary date in a system of arbitrary dates.
When I was a kid I was surprised that the world was so haphazardly organized: Why doesn’t the new year begin when the world is reborn, in spring? Wouldn’t it make sense to shave a day off two of the 31-day months and add those two days to February so we didn’t have a month that had only 28 days? What’s with that “r” in February, anyway? And how about the one in library, while we’re at it?
Such questions were an early inkling that the adults-in-charge had no idea what they were doing.
Casting about for a date when the new year would feel like a new year, I settled on two possibilities. One was the first day of school, a day that feels utterly different from the last day of summer vacation, a day that we greeted, as one greets all new experiences, with excitement and dread, not to mention new clothes, new pencils and new loose-leaf binders.
My other candidate for a new New Year’s was the winter solstice. The logic was very appealing: The old year would end on the day when the earth is farthest from the sun. Though the new year wouldn’t feel different from the old, weather-wise, the knowledge, at that dark time, that the days were getting longer again makes us feel way better about the long winter slog ahead.
One thing I wasn’t aware of when I was a kid was how ethnocentric, how borealcentric I was. When I decided that the new year and the academic year should run on parallel tracks it didn’t occur to me that not everyone started school the day after Labor Day, nor even that not everyone celebrated Labor Day. All I knew, because my birthday fell on a different day of the week every year, was that for Labor Day to be on a Monday every year, the date would have to change every year. Since I didn’t like the idea of the new year beginning on whatever date that first Tuesday after Labor Day happened to be, I figured, OK, what if the new year started on Sept. 1?
Didn’t like it. If the first day of school wasn’t going to coincide exactly with the first day of the year there didn’t seem to be any point in moving it. Have school start on Sept. 1, whatever day of the week that happened to be? I couldn’t picture school starting on Saturday or Sunday. Even Friday sounded dumb.
As for my solstice idea, the problem there, I did not realize until later, was that for Earth’s southerners – Bolivians, Zambians, Australians, New Zealanders – the logic of starting the new year at the start of our planet’s journey back toward the sun demands that the new year start in June. So forget solstices and equinoxes. They make as much sense as starting the year when pitchers and catchers report for spring training – around Valentine’s Day – or on Opening Day, though that is when time really begins, if you’re a baseball fan. Or so declared Washington Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell.
And speaking of Valentine’s Day and Opening Day and New Year’s Day and the things one puzzles over as a kid, were you ever bothered by the fact that a new day starts at midnight rather than at sunrise? The whole idea of 1, 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning perturbed me. How can 2 a.m. be morning and the dead of night at the same time? Why would we use the word day to mean both a whole 24-hour period and the part of that 24-hour period when the sun is shining?
Maybe I was just a weird kid, but such ruminations prepared me for my career as a newspaper reporter when I had to keep in mind that what I was writing today was not going to be read until tomorrow so I had to write that something that was happening tomorrow was happening today. You follow?
Columnist Mitch Albom once got in trouble for writing about two NBA players watching their alma mater play in the NCAA tournament final. The problem: Between the time when he wrote the column and when the game was actually played, the two alumni changed their plans. They didn’t show, which turned the column into a work of fiction.
Despite my misgivings about Dec. 31 as the last day of the year, I don’t think I went out on a limb by writing on Tuesday that we’ll be celebrating New Year’s Eve tonight. If we have a warm snap, I’ll apologize next week.
