Clarrie Feinstein
When the new year comes around, most celebrate with family and friends, excitedly waiting for the clock to strike midnight and welcome in the new year. The new year invites the possibilities of change, and with that comes excitement.
But what happens if this is your second new year’s celebration this year? Many people celebrate new year’s according to the Christian calendar — even if one comes from a different ethnic or religious background, our societal holidays and celebrations follow the Gregorian year. However, in early September I celebrated Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which directly translates to “head of the year.” During Rosh Hashanah we dip apples in honey to represent a sweet year ahead full of fruitful change, and eat a round challah (a sweet bread) to symbolize a complete and bountiful year. These rituals and traditions are full of meaning and importance, and while I enjoy drinking and hanging out with my friends on December 31st, I find more fulfillment in these religious practices, because they resonate with me on a much deeper level.
The concept of the new year is loaded with historical and ritualistic importance for many cultures and religions — often the significance for the new year was very practical. The Hebrew new year was representative of the renewed cycles of sowing, growth, and the harvest, which would be marked with agricultural festivals in the ancient Near East. For the Hebrew calendar, the current year is 5775 — take that 2016! As with many cultures, in other words, the reason behind the welcoming of another year was agricultural. It is important to note that this holiday is representative of a non-Western tradition, which holds the historical weight of thousands of years. It is important to be aware of the various rituals that are still upheld by people who must follow a Christian calendar. While Canada proudly separates Church and State, the very basis of our concept of time and chronology follows a Christian system.
For those who follow this system, yet also celebrate their own holidays on very different calendars, one feels that some sort of compensation should be made; which holiday should I put more time into? Which one is more important? But perhaps the point isn’t to decide which celebration is right or wrong, or which one is more substantial than the other, but to recognize that there is a multiplicity of experience in these commonplace celebrations that we should always be aware of.
Laura Charney
Bringing in “The New Year” is a strange, loaded concept: yesterday, it was last year. Today is a new year. What does that even mean?
The idea of one year (2015) ending, followed by another one (2016) beginning, is bizarre to internalize because it’s fundamentally a constructed organization of the universe, limited to a modern Western understanding. But this was not always how the progression of life was measured.
Humans began intentionally harvesting their land over ten thousand years ago. The invention of agriculture represents the moment at which people started to manipulate their natural environments in a controlled, predictable way, leading to seasons, and this thing called “time.”
The Inca calendar, based on solstices, equinoxes, moon cycles, and orientations of the planets, determined the processes of rites and rituals, agriculture, construction, and warfare. It foretold the coming of El Niño years, and allowed them to prepare accordingly. Societal rituals, such as human sacrifice, were reactions to natural phenomena. Following cyclical conceptions of time, these rituals generated an ideology of reciprocity: death and destruction necessitating the nourishment of life and fertility. In contrast, the Judeo-Christian tradition sees the movement of the world as historically linear: with a divine creation, and an inevitable demise.
We who follow the Christian calendar engage in strange rituals of our own, at the turning of a calendar year. Belligerent drinking, feasting, wearing sparkly makeup, and congregating in public spaces come to mind. But nothing compares to the magic, the anticipation, of the New Year’s Kiss.
According to www.kissingmatters.com, the New Year’s Kiss is “one of our most life-affirming pleasures and only comes around so many times.” Anybody who has seen The O.C. episode when Ryan runs up the stairwell of an entire condo building to sweep Marissa off her feet knows how utterly life-affirming that kiss can be.
Up there in the Most Life-Affirming New Year’s Kisses of All Time is the embrace between two of my favourite characters, Sally Albright and Harry Burns (When Harry Met Sally).The spontaneous expression of love—romantic love triumphing over their once platonic love—feels right when coinciding with the coming of a new year: fresh, untarnished, invigorated.
Now, the ritual in itself no longer suffices. Many people feel it must be documented and shared in order to validate its occurrence. Many of those people are people I regret following on Instagram. I wonder if our pre-Christian ancestors looked longingly into each other’s eyes as the moon eclipsed the sun, and publicly declared, “Happy winter solstice baby, new moon cycle, same guy!”
It might not be that far-fetched. Spectacle and ritual often go hand in hand, from antiquity through the present day. Whether it’s a shared photo of lip-locked lovers, or a sacrifice atop an ancient Mayan temple-pyramid, exhibitionism of societal rituals reinforce social bonds while reproducing the ideological order of the universe.
Social rituals act as a sort of salvation to the mundane of every day life: events to anticipate, to “nostalgify” and recreate. Perhaps “time” is a strange, arbitrary extension of how we divide and conquer our lives. Perhaps the idea of a “fresh start” is culturally created. I guess we’re only human, and we’re all just trying to survive.
