Why Celebrate a New Year?

I was sitting on the couch before I arrived at my current caffeinated state and wondering why do we celebrate the New Year. I watched a slurred, sad Dick Clark count down the numbers and watched an overhyped and frigid New York celebration. Soon the "exciting" bit was over and I felt a little underwhelmed. Somewhere between the living room and my bedroom, fireworks started shooting and I thought about all those people celebrating.

And for what, I thought?

Then I came up with it. We're celebrating this because it's something that represents what goodness there is in human nature. The fact that we do get chances to try again, opportunities to regenerate and we become part of the idea that no matter what's happened and how often we've screwed things up, a New Year will always come, unchanging and unbiased towards our behavior.

So now I'm in my caffeine induced state and it really makes a lot of sense to me. We're celebrating not the coming of a new year as a physical change of calendar or even as a marker for the end of an old calendar. We're celebrating that we can still keep flipping that calendar and that with it comes a whole new calendar's worth of opportunity.

Just when you're about to get overwhelmed by consumerism and popular culture, it's important to remember that we can still all celebrate the idea of a whole year of new opportunity and the ceaselessness of that coming of that opportunity.

And that's a great feeling. So let's celebrate that!