I’ve always had an affection for New Year’s Eve
It’s a holiday about introspection and reflection
Taking into account the passage of time
and as such, necessarily, death
Thinking about what happened, where you are, what’s going to be
Drinking crisp, bubbling champagne and watching a clock assiduously
like you’re trying a new recipe
but the recipe is your mortal coil upon this earth
or something
The major holidays are touchstones upon the basest human emotions and hangups and sources of happiness
Valentine’s Day is for love and relationships, being close to someone and touching their butt and stuff
(I mean, it’d ideally be more about appreciation of them as a person but consumerism tends to skew it toward some horny dimension or something, anyway)
The Fourth of July is that warlike, Our People sort of instinct. A tribalism wherein we are great as a people. It’s always hot for this one. Makes a person immediate, snappy. Our tribe rules. Look, we’re blowing shit up in the sky. We could turn it on you if we wanted. A very strength and masculine-type festival.
Halloween is a cool one because it celebrates mystery. It is about inviting fear. It comes at a time of year when the nights are getting longer, the green grass is dying, the world seems to be shutting down, and you also disguise yourself. You become a different creature to stalk the night in search of Treats. This is true as a child or as a horny college student. The nights are deeper, darker, colder. You are going to venture into it with fantastical armor. Unafraid of the night, but it’s also fun to scare yourself sometimes.
Thanksgiving often gets overlooked. I like it a lot. The month of November fucking sucks, greasy grey-brown doldrums. It could hail, or snow, or just be grey skies and windy. But Thanksgiving is there to remind us that a bounty still sits in storage. We have prepared for this winter. We gorge on food and doze on couches to football. It’s a sedative sort of holiday. I know the sun is dying on the vine. Eat and sleep, mammal. We’re getting through this.
Christmas has been fucking cornholed by capitalism, but I think I get the gist of it. The days always start getting longer right around Christmas. Our ancestors and our descendants will both watch where the sun sets and start celebrating when it goes back the other way, into longer days. A gift-giving holiday makes sense. A stressful, artificial need for some sort of love-expressed-through-consumerism is horse shit.
And then in the wake of the bombastic, in-your-face marketing of Christmas, comes little humble New Year’s Eve. Everyone’s looking at their mostly dead Christmas tree, catching scotch-tape and wrapper bits on their socks, hungover. The week of wishing that we did enough.
A somber song begins rumbling up. Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? The year is old and succumbing to that slipstream that is the ever widening past. New tombstones rise from the loamy soil into your head and heart each year. The song of your own life might move into a different chord, you might find something new in the future. The clock on the wall raises that second, minute, hour hand to the sky. You’re counting down but you almost don’t believe you’re really here.
Happy new year!
With a long drink, and a look into your friends’ eyes. Here we are in the future. I’m so glad I made it here with you.
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