Welcome, 2009! Happy New Year!
New Year has always been my favorite holiday.
Maybe it's just the habit of childhood (New Year's Eve was a traditional family holiday and the equivalent of Christmas/Chanukkah/Thanksgiving in the Soviet Union days, for most of us who grew up in a secular atheist state -- we'd sit down to a family feast table and raise glasses to welcome the New Year while the bells of the Kremlin tower struck twelve times and Brezhnev gave his soporific boring speech, drinking toasts to the old year and the new, and starting to eat only after midnight)... but to me the striking of the clock is still true magic.
As the second turned, I'd find small presents under the New Year Tree (I still don't know how my parents managed it), and would go digging underneath the fragrant fir branches among the glass ornaments and real candles pinched onto the branches (talk about a fire hazard!).
No other holiday has such a tangible realtime moment of wonder.
May you find the elusive, breathtaking spark this year as the clock strikes and the year turns...
Happy New Year!
Joy! Health! Contentment! Renewal!
And always, Peace.
Maybe it's just the habit of childhood (New Year's Eve was a traditional family holiday and the equivalent of Christmas/Chanukkah/Thanksgiving in the Soviet Union days, for most of us who grew up in a secular atheist state -- we'd sit down to a family feast table and raise glasses to welcome the New Year while the bells of the Kremlin tower struck twelve times and Brezhnev gave his soporific boring speech, drinking toasts to the old year and the new, and starting to eat only after midnight)... but to me the striking of the clock is still true magic.
As the second turned, I'd find small presents under the New Year Tree (I still don't know how my parents managed it), and would go digging underneath the fragrant fir branches among the glass ornaments and real candles pinched onto the branches (talk about a fire hazard!).
No other holiday has such a tangible realtime moment of wonder.
May you find the elusive, breathtaking spark this year as the clock strikes and the year turns...
Happy New Year!
Joy! Health! Contentment! Renewal!
And always, Peace.