Find one person who claims to not be happy the year 2020 ending and you’ll find yourself a liar.
This has been a brutal year that started out rather boring and uneventful, and nose-dived into an abyss of awful where it drowned for 10 months.
While New Year’s Eve is my favorite holiday, I suspect this year it will be most everyone else’s, too, at least for this year.
Cultures around the world use a host of calendars: 2021 is 7529 in the Byzantine calendar, 6771 in the Assyrian calendar, 5781 in the Hebrew calendar, 4718 in the Chinese calendar, 2565 in the Buddhist calendar, 1442 in the Islamic calendar and Reiwa 3 in Japan — the third year of Emperor Naruhito.
It will be 2774 an urbe condita — since the founding of the city of Rome, the dating system used by the Roman Republic and Empire — and 12021 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.
These calendars do not agree on the year and most do not mark Jan. 1 as their start.
Even so, the peoples of the world 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. It is the one day of the year when people come together regardless of nationality, religion, creed or culture to celebrate together.
Worldwide celebrations are not simultaneous, as each time zone’s celebration is an hour apart for the length of an entire day, but seeing fireworks above Tokyo Bay, Sydney Harbor, the Blue Mosque, Red Square, the Parthenon, Big Ben and Times Square only adds to the anticipation of midnight and the calendar rollover by the time it reaches us in Northern Arizona.
The absurdity of New Year’s Eve is that we choose to celebrate an entirely contrived moment, created by assigning monumental importance on a particular time — midnight — in 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.
Regardless of all these technicalities, all human cultures have the same concept of a year — one revolution around our sun — just as we do a day — the passage of time from the sun position in the sky through the night and back to that position again — and thus the changing of the new year is a profound moment for us as individuals.
The end of the year allows us to reflect on all that’s happened in our recent passage around our sun, the victories and losses, the deaths and births, the start of new enterprises and end of old empires. This year, with so many of us stuck at home due to quarantine, unemployment, remote working or remote schooling, it’s been hard to start new things, making the losses more pronounced, compounded by those whose lives were lost in the current pandemic.
But we can still hope. As the year ends and the new one begins, we reflect on our loved ones, offering the lost ones a final reverence and remembering that our extended family, whether living across town, across the country or serving oversees, are celebrating the new year too.
New Year’s Eve also gives us a moment to remember that whether we speak English, Basque, Pitjantjatjara, Swahili, Ainu or Kutenai, whether we whisper prayers to Allah, Mother Earth, Vishnu, Yahweh or a pantheon, whether we elect a president, choose a parliament or revere a king in Africa, Asia, Europe or the Americas, we are brothers and sisters, members of the same species celebrating one moment together, remembering our past and hoping for a better future tomorrow and in a new year to come.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
