The Sense of an Ending

Where does New Year come from & what does it mean to you? Gather your blankets & candles, I'm sharing a cosy ritual for any time you feel called to reflect and reset

I haven’t partied like it’s 1999 in a long time. New Year’s Eve has become a much quieter ritual for me. Something much more in rhythm with the season. Slow, contemplative. A time to nourish and reflect. I might have a long bath, journal, go to bed early — and sleep through too if it wasn’t for the tribal midnight chorus blasting through walls and windows everywhere as if England had just won the World Cup.

As someone who has been trying to invite in a steadier pace of life in recent years, I like to create the same feeling that I am seeking in the newly arriving one, to set a precedent for all that’s to come.

My most memorable New Year’s perhaps inevitably, was that old classic Y2K: were we going to make it through?? I almost didn’t, bouncing atop the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Halls on London’s South Bank without a care in the world — and a 40 foot drop to the skate park below unbeknownst at our backs. But we were young, there were fireworks! It was the Millennium and we were going to live forever.

There’s still the odd year where there’s a party too good to pass up on, an opportunity to hang with a gang of treasured friends whose schedules’ rarely ever align these days, but these gatherings have increasingly become the exception, not the rule. Most of my friends also now opt for the more pre-emptive New Year’s Eve eve get together instead — so that we might arise on January 1st with lighter heads and a springier step? I’m not sure but it feels rebellious in a way that chancing London Town for New Year does to teenagers who don’t know any better, plus it tees you up nicely for a much lower key homemade version of the same.

But where does this tradition even come from? What established this weirdly universally accepted time portal? How is it that our calendars became globally in sync? Is my newfound desire to curl up and honour the year’s highs and lows, to shed the dead weight of what’s past, to look ahead to the possibility of carving out a new path for myself, actually stemming from an inner, primitive calling that’s somehow related to it all? One that’s been part of our culture for thousands of years?