New Year – How Exciting is that! When I was a child I was always desperate to stay up late to “see in the New Year”. I always had an inkling that the adults were up to something really exciting (and maybe they were!) so exciting that children needed to be packed off to bed. As an adult I have become less concerned about seeing in the “New Year”. If I am still awake as Big Ben strikes and Jules Holland celebrates on the TV, then I am more likely to be engrossed in a conversation with another person only to look up and find out that it all happened 10 minutes ago. I have crossed the threshold of one year to another without noticing! Thresholds. The New Year is a chance to step from one moment and into another. In the great scheme of time and atoms and moments then the seconds of time of that crossing are no different than perhaps those that were 60 minutes before or after – but in terms of my connection to it I have been propelled to somewhere different. Somewhere New. And it is not just on the 1st of January that these thresholds are crossed. For some September often feels much more like the New Year. For the church the beginning of Advent heralds a “New Year”. And it is not as if the “New” bit is something that needs to be completely unexpected. A first of January in 2022 may look very similar to that of 2021. So it is not completely unknown, as we can predict (perhaps) what might be ahead of us. It is also not that all the “old” things of the previous year are shed from us and gone and forgotten. We bring a lot of ourselves, our experiences and our traditions with us into the New Year. Christmas is not forgotten and discarded on January 1st – in fact the Christmas season spans across the secular seasonal 4
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