At the Christmas Brunch someone shared with our table how her relative who lived in Perth, Australia, was experiencing 104 degree weather. It’s hard for me to imagine celebrating New Year like we celebrate the 4th of July (only 20 degrees hotter…in a good year). But, while 104 degrees seems excessively hot to me, it tickles my imagination to wonder what it would be like to experience New Year in the middle of summer weather. How the historical circumstances aligned themselves so that we, who live in the Northern Hemisphere, whose circumstances and influencers decided such things, chose the dead of winter makes and interesting study. January 1st seems natural to me, especially as that’s what I’m used to. I will of course continue to celebrate fast asleep in a warm bed with the furnace on, as I have no plans to travel to Australia to celebrate New Year’s Day.

It seems we are pretty set on numbering “years,” like this being 2026. But even that is a rather recent way to mark the passage of time—a collection of four seasons creating a unit as opposed to one season, or a collection of eight or twelve, or sixty. If I remember correctly, many of our political histories based their counts on things like reigns of kings or leaders of some kind—“in the fifth year of the reign of so and so,” or like in the Roman Republic, when it was sequenced by the list of the two men who shared the leadership—“during the consulship of so and so and so and so.” Some cultures had fixed dates of one kind or another, like the mythical foundation of a capital city or creation of the world or a civilization, but those were often secondary to the more immediate or recent political markers. In most cases, like for us, with some religious overtones, measures of time were about the start and end dates for figuring taxation, like Roman Indictions, a fifteen year cycle to our current counting.

But for all those who figure it is a new year, whether it starts in the dead of winter, the planting of crops in the spring, or the harvesting of crops in the fall, whether it starts with this or that king’s reign or some creation of something many cycles of seasons ago, it is the new start we all seem to need and can appreciate. Whatever has happened in the past twelve months to our count, it is now in the past. Now is the time for the new, or the new view, or the new start of things. The Roman god Janus, for whom January is named, had two faces, the one looking back and the other forward. We learn from the past and now look forward. There is an opportunity for a mindful wisdom available to us with the new year if we so choose.

“Yeah,” we can tell ourselves, “that happened back in 2025.” But now it’s 2026. And so it is. There will be good and bad in every year, pride and shame, need for distance and hope. This is available to all of us. Whether it comes in sweltering heat or snow and freezing rain, this marker of time comes around again. I wish for all who read this a happy “new” year. May the next twelve months be good to you, and may you be able to rise to meet its challenges. Happy New Year.