In looking back at 2023, I would invite all our readers to make a list of all the positive things they have experienced this year and see how long you can make it.

Last year, one of my friends made and reached a goal of 365.

We at the newspaper have covered major stories and profiled both local leaders and common residents trying to make our communities better. We have also reported on deaths and tragedies, doing out best to humanize those who have suffered. We’ve explored government activities and political maneuvering, attempting to shed light on what our leaders have been doing with our tax dollars, be it new programs or old, or improvements to roads, trails and facilities.

We have a really strong team of journalists, photojournalists and newspaper staffers at all three of our newspapers in Camp Verde, Cottonwood and Sedona who have been bringing you the news this year, and we have scored some really strong scoops and exclusives.

We hope for more going into 2024. We are heading into an election year, so some things will likely be insane, so let’s aim to keep our wits about us.

Personally, I have watched our twins grow from crawling infants to walking and sprinting toddlers, just on the verge of speaking, while our daughter has excelled in kindergarten, learning reading and math which she employs more and more, even reading to her brother and sister. I’ve hosted poetry slams, bringing performance poets to Sedona to entertain local audiences, and led the effort to set up a statewide performance poetry network that my fellow poetry hosts have grown into a very active website and state art scene.

I suggest you make your own list and share it with friends and family before the Georgian calendar marks the end of the year.

Cultures around the world use a host of calendars: 2024 is 7532 in the Byzantine calendar, 6774 in the Assyrian calendar, 5784 and 5785 in the Hebrew calendar, 4721 in the Chinese calendar, 2568 in the Buddhist calendar, 1445 and 1446 in the Islamic calendar and Reiwa 6 in Japan — the sixth year of Emperor Naruhito. It will be 2777 ab urbe condita — technically MMDCCLXXVII — since the founding of the city of Rome, the dating system used by the Roman Republic and later Roman Empire.

In the Holocene calendar, which marks an approximation of the start of the Holocene geological epoch and the Neolithic Revolution when humans began transitioning from hunter-gatherer societies into settled agricultural communities, anthropologists add 10,000 years to the Gregorian calendar, so happy 12,024 to you and yours.

These calendars do not agree on the year and most do not use Jan. 1 as the their start.

Years themselves aren’t uniform. A tropical year is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 45 seconds, but a sidereal year, or a full orbit around the sun, is 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, 9.76 seconds. Because the earth wobbles a bit from perihelion to aphelion and back, an anomalistic year is 365 days, 6 hours, 13 minutes, 52.6 seconds.

At least there’s an easy-to-remember universal standard for a second: The time that elapses during 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation produced by the transition between two levels of the cesium-133 atom. Simple enough. Of course, that rate also changes depending on your relative speed and proximity to a large gravitational body.

Specifics aside, we have collectively agreed for the sake of commerce, conversation and convenience to use the Gregorian calendar internationally and as the regular secular calendar in nearly all countries on Earth and a year is … a year however specifically or loosely you define it.

All this absurdity is that New Year’s Eve is an entirely contrived moment, created by assigning monumental importance to a particular time — midnight — at a particular place in our revolution around our sun — a few days after the winter solstice when Earth is on the far side of the sun from our galaxy’s center, just slightly above the galactic plane as our solar system tumbles through the Orion Arm.

We silly people come together to celebrate it together regardless of nationality, religion, creed or culture.

Despite the wins and losses this year, we still hope, as this year ends and the new one begins. We can reflect on our loved ones, offering the lost ones a final reverence and remember that our extended family, whether living across town, across the country or serving oversees, are celebrating the new year, too. We are members of the same species celebrating one arbitrary moment, remembering our past and hoping for a better future tomorrow and in a new year to come.