A Brief Note Before New Year's Day is Over

and 1/1 becomes 1/2.

This year, I’ve come around to realizing that New Year’s Day is my favorite holiday. Not necessarily the preliminary Eve, although it too is a top contender. After the rushed revelry of the 31st, the following day feels calm, quiet, and inevitable.

New Year’s happens no matter how you spend it; what you do, how you live your life, what else happens around you. I find this comforting and unifying. On my first walk of the day, a stranger wished me a happy new year. What’s a more wholesome greeting? I wish your future well. Time passes, don’t let it get you down.

2026 is a newborn baby and billions of people honor its introduction. Some break apart fruit and bread and dishware, others make fire and dance and drink ashes from their cups. You can mourn, reflect, celebrate, or do nothing at all. The day comes regardless, and something is irreversibly changed.

This is still partly of human design — systematically marking the passage of time — but the nature of time itself is pure. Maybe that’s why I find New Year’s a particularly appealing holiday — because it’s unaffiliated with belief, history, or personal circumstance. Even the commercialization feels lesser in comparison to the other calendar holidays. The window of celebration is short. There’s not much lead-up because it comes so swiftly on the heels of the long-awaited and teased Christmas season, so marketers don’t pour as much money into promotion and product. Not for lack of trying, but I like to think there’s a little something about New Year’s that late-stage capitalism can’t touch. If not Eve, then definitely Day. After AM festivities wind down, day 1 is sort of ordinary, except for that sudden perception of quiet after the year has closed out with another frantic holiday season. And acknowledgment from a neighbor of shared understanding that we have once again revolved around the sun on the same planet together. We are another year older, wiser, wearier. But our concept of the “new year” is still fresh. We see something different, even just a single number, and we point to each other and say gently, “Hey, look at that.”

My second walk of the day was paired with headphones and a new playlist. A song is most exciting at its first few notes, before the chorus rolls around and you decide whether or not you like it. I usually get an inkling pretty quickly whether I’m going to enjoy a song, but there’s a lot of possibility in the intro.

Whether you feel hopeful, cynical, or uncertain around this time, I wish you well in this new number.

Cheers,

Elena