Without any curmudgeonly agenda, and with a sense of positive and due respect to my fellow human, I’m never going to understand the purpose of the common greeting “Happy New Year”.
The calendar year as we know it is an immense increment of time, in anyone’s life. Sure, you stack up enough of those things and they get smaller and put more mileage on all of us. But it’s all about what we endure inside each of those 365-day boxes. Twelve separated compartments of almost four seven-day sections each. That’s quite an undertaking, and not something upon which to bring some overall pronouncement in any possible way, as presumably well-meant as that might be.
The greeting itself as we know it, “Happy New Year”, certainly has its roots in preceding cultures. Greek, European, Asian, I couldn’t even tell you. But the history is all there for the researching. At the same time though, it’s possible that a more religious-based cohesion in those earlier cultures brought a greater, more sophisticated and respectful meaning to such words. It wasn’t a thoughtless three-word phrase that conjured up mind images of two-second local television IDs during midnight movies, throngs of drunken young people screaming and blowing paper horns in Times Square, and little holiday logos on cardboard coffee goblets doled out in midtown deli shops.
A calendar year in anyone’s life presents at start immense possibilities. Some not necessarily great, if you get my drift. And we’re not even talking anticipated ones. In the arts, there’s the concept defined as “hubris”. To make a long definition short, that’s the poisonous ingredient that swells the head of the tragic hero and plummets him to his demise. It’s actually within the contract of various heritage cultures and religions that you’re not supposed to make comment or pronouncement upon one’s immediate future, for fear of any misapprehension of hubris. Even a buzzed driver can make it across the boulevard intersection unscathed once in a while. But as a practice, no one would condone this.
Sure, it’s a little phrase all meant in kindness. But unlike the acknowledgement of a prescient holy day or actual commemoration, such as Christmas or maybe St. Patricks Day, consider the meaning of the words. You’re making a definitive pronouncement and beyond that, a command upon someone’s untenable fortune. Is that necessarily respectful..?
If it’s a greeting recognizing the very day itself, well then you have to bring thought to what that means, and what the words mean to those receiving them. Is there anything religiously founded and solemn in nature about the common conception of New Year’s Day..? Or is it some imposed mandate upon “happiness”, much like Thanksgiving brings mandate for “family togetherness”..? How many are capable of immediately bringing a sense of this unattainable thing known as “happiness” to the turn of a new calendar year, carrying everything their lives have yet to shed or attain..? Anyone bearing a positive mood on January 1st will undoubtedly stroll down the avenue with all the charm of a Gene Kelly musical-variety TV special. And they just might look upon their “Happy New Year” greeting to that approaching stranger as a beautiful sharing of their warm and precious charm into their heart. The promise of that sure is beautiful.
One time, in my early teens, my mother and I were out for a stroll on New Year’s Day, when we ran into a friend of hers, a very nice, reserved middle-aged lady. Introduced suddenly to this woman, I kindly approached with an appropriate, “Happy New Year”, which is when my mom tugged at my arm in some effort at subtlety, and glared at me with that “uh-uhh” scowl. Okay, what’d I do wrong now..??
Onto our respective ways, my mom leaned into me and said, “she’s very emotionally fragile and her husband is very ill…” Great. Thanks for warning me. But that innocent mishap taught me something invaluable about the unintended weight of a light greeting.
It’s been decades since I’ve valued the New Year’s Eve and Day as anything frivolously celebratory. Being one of the life-long Jewish faith, raised in a mostly mixed Judeo-Christian population where “the whole commercial Christmas thing”, as Charlie Brown might have perceived it, maintains the upper hand in the industrial complex, I’ve managed, throughout any maturity I’ve accrued, to observe this thing known as the turn of the New Year as literally a day of quiet, peaceful and solemn reflection. That thing known to the devout and secular alike as “prayer”. It’s not, certainly as the new pandemic and it’s restrictions has reminded us, just for churches, temples, places of worship or even religions of worship. And it isn't necessarily something of a prerequisite, endowed trillion-year cultural heritage in ritual that need be mindfully nor mournfully intense. Alternately, it's something all of us are readily capable of, and probably more prepared to practice than we realize. It’s a valve toward mindful, inner peace. I don’t know anyone who couldn’t benefit from that point blank.
That’s why the stranger I encounter with friendly intention is met on New Year’s Day with a term we could probably all do well to adopt: “Peace”.
N.F
