Thou Shouldst Not Have Been Old: A Note on the Worst of Holidays

I have been trying, for more than a year, to figure out why I dislike New Year’s Eve. No—why be polite?—why I hate New Year’s Eve. I could say it’s because it’s a drunk’s holiday, a night that promises everything and gives you none of it; I could say it’s because it has no tradition outside of simple math; I could just say I was raised on New Year’s Day brunches rather than orgies the night before. And I’d be right to say any of that. But the real reason I hate New Year’s is that it’s a fool’s holiday—and when I say fool I don’t mean the wise little dolt who follows around after the hero in a play.

It’s a fool’s holiday because it celebrates time in the most delusionary sense. It asks us all to celebrate the same second in the same way, and anyone with a pinch introspection in his or her head knows we aren’t capable of that. We live as brave creatures, each struggling to carve out our space in the wilderness, each with our own delusions and dreams and trepidations. A good holiday remembers that—reminds us of who we are—refines us in an honest way. New Year’s, unfortunately, treats us as anything but individuals, asking us to be literally happy on cue.

Christmas, for example, is just the opposite. For all its commercialization, the experience of Christmas remains intensely personal. Ask different people what Christmas means to them and you get a different answer every time. It’s never perfect, but that’s the point. It’s human. The core of the holiday is imbedded in the home—by the hearth, in the dinning room and kitchen—and, because a fitful and fantastic sleep is an essential part of Christmas from an early age, it lives even deeper than that—in the inner rooms of each of our hearts. It’s a touchstone of hope and charity that we revisit each year with dogged faith in the good that’s yet to come. That’s the genius of A Christmas Carol: Dickens saw that each of us is reborn at Christmas because it was our first experience of hope. We live it with our whole being, past, present, and future.

Ask different people what they do on New Year’s Eve and you’ll get a story about Champagne (that probably isn’t even Champagne) and a TV program. No—the TV program. Maybe it’s just the Orwell in me, but that doesn’t sit right. Christmas may have its quirks but at least it gives respite from the madness of modern soceity. New Year’s is practically the spectacle’s magnum opus.

Thanksgiving gets the nod for the same reason as Christmas—it brings us back in from the cold, both literally and figuratively—and Easter, which anticipated either by weeks of Lent or just the hardship of winter is a fitting celebration of new life in a new world. Even political holidays, like July Fourth and MLK Day, although they might not be for everyone, are days that ask us to look back at our high ideals (and, yes, our failures, too) and summon new strength and hope.

What all of these share and New Year’s lacks is the imperative to look back before we look forward, to reach down into memory and know ourselves again. Of course, a lot of people write down their regrets and hopes, but nothing about the holiday encourages them to really face them. It’s a frat party mascarading as a sacred ritual. And where I don’t want to disparage a little fun now and then (as I sip my High Life—some real Champagne), let’s not mistake it for what’s really important. Family, community, even country: when we turn back to these we are reminded of our better selves. Even a party with good friends celebrates the faith we have in each other to be better people.

But all New Year’s celebrates is a clock, that little machine that always looks forward and never turns back. And a clock will never help us know the human heart. That operates in a different kind of time, a sacred time, a time that runs beneath our own existence and into the current of the cosmos. A good holiday is a passage into that current. To quote the great religious scholar Mirce Elide, “Participation in a festival implies emerging from ordinary temporal duration and reintegration of the mythical time reactualized by the festival itself.” A good holiday reconnects us with the best stories and memories, which is just another way of saying it takes us back to our dreams.  

That kind of passage takes time. A long meal; a leisurely day at home; a few weeks (the real duration of Christmas, which is only half over) to travel home and back and think long thoughts during long drives and layovers and everything else in between. There’s no way one second (which only a machine can comprehend anyway), muchless the same second, offers the same redemption.

So go ahead and celebrate your wristwatch. And believe, once again, that it could ever come close to measuring our existence. I spend enough of my life studying clocks as it is. I’ll be the other kind of fool tonight.

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Detail, Visions of Eternity (1936/37 ), Salvador Dali; Art Institute of Chicago