Celebrate the dawning of 2022 – celebrate the moment, says Darrel Bristow-Bovey with a tear in his eye.
We all have our own rituals to help us into a new year. For a long time, my New Year’s Eve ritual involved a vacuum cleaner. By 8pm at the latest, I’d haul out the Dyson and vacuum my study, making soothing patterns on the red pile of the carpet. Why do I have a red carpet in the study? Does it energise me and help me write? No, it’s because it was there when I bought the house, and every year since my list of New Year’s resolutions has included the line item: “Change the carpet in my study”, usually just after “Eat less” and “Exercise more”.
It felt soothing to vacuum the carpet, to suck up the dust and detritus and sloughed DNA of the previous year. It felt as though as I was giving myself the best chance of a good year. Then I would go downstairs and make a Spanish omelette, and a Pisco Sour for my partner, which she only drinks once a year.
Just before midnight we would open the back door then the front door and listen to the schmucks down the road celebrating 30 seconds too early. We would allow the old year to leave at the back and the new year to arrive in the front, then we would close the doors and stroll around our neighbourhood, then go home to sleep and wake up the next morning without a hangover and feeling smug about our choices.
The very thought of changing the ritual would cause me to break out in cold sweat and indignation. How dare you invite me to your house on New Year’s Eve?! Do you want to ruin my year?! Why do you hate me so?!
But then 2020 happened, and 2021 as well, and I realised that superstitions are fine but they don’t protect you from anything. Rituals should be made from joy, not fear.
In September this year, I was at a lunch party. One of the guests was bewailing the fact that because of lockdown, she hadn’t had a countdown to New Year with her extended family. Every year, in the seconds before midnight, their ritual was to hold hands and count backwards from 10 – and then cheer and kiss at midnight, and wish each other a good year ahead. Without it, she said she felt her year was hollow, as though it hadn’t yet properly started.
We understood, but what could be done about it? By now it was 2.18pm on September 12.
Then someone suggested a countdown to 2.19pm. It started off politely and sedately – a group of people humouring a friend – but then it reached zero and everyone shouted “Happy New Year” and as we turned and hugged the people on either side of us, it suddenly felt as rich and intense and emotional as a real New Year, but the best kind of New Year, a new year of our own deciding, something starting because we wanted it to start, a moment being celebrated because moments are worth celebrating, because really moments are all we have, and the more of them we can have the better.
So we all started laughing and everyone stood and hugged everyone else and we felt happy and we wanted each other to be happy and I beamed and shed a quiet weird tear.
I hope we all have a good year. Wherever we all are on New Year’s Eve or at 2.19 on September 12, I hope we’re happy and making new rituals, even if they only last for just that moment.