Today, my family is ringing in the New Year for the fourth time in 2017.
In January, we reveled with champagne and caviar.
In February, we received homemade turnip cakes and lai see—festive, cash-filled red envelopes customary for the Chinese New Year—from my husband’s 97-year-old Chinese nanny, who also raised my Indian mother-in-law in Hong Kong and is now our surrogate grandmother.
In September, we ate apples and honey, and cheered as my 2-year-old greeted my parents with a joyous, “Shana tova,” a phrase he brought home from his Jewish nursery school.
And finally, today we celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. We are marking the triumph of good over evil in spiritual lore, the unofficial start of another new year. We’ll say puja, or prayers, around the house—particularly in my home office, to appeal for a prosperous year. And we’ll accept my mother-in-law’s annual delivery—an aromatic, seven-vegetable curry—along with her challenge to guess the mystery produce, which typically ranges from run-of-the-mill potatoes to exotic (but easily identifiable) lotus root.
Until this year, it never even occurred to me that four celebrations to observe one phenomenon—the passage of time—could be considered, well, a lot. And it’s kind of confusing to boot, especially for my 5-year-old, whose birthday just happens to fall on January 1st.
It took a while to convince Baby New Year that the noisemakers and fireworks from the rest of the world didn’t herald the auspicious occasion of his birth. I thought we were good once he accepted that, but this year’s multiple New Year celebrations threw him for a loop.
Admittedly, when he asked how there could be four new years in a single one, I went about the discussion all wrong. I started explaining the scientific concept of time—how it takes the earth 365 days to orbit the sun, and how different cultures developed their own calendars to mark each day’s passage thousands of years ago. That didn’t go over so well.
“But doesn’t the earth orbit the sun at the same speed everywhere in the world? Why would people end up with different calendars and different New Years?” he asked.
Ummm, did I just get schooled in astronomy by a 5-year-old?
Clearly, I was incapable of delivering a cogent, scientific argument to a kindergartener and needed to consider the emotional case—what our various New Year celebrations meant to me, personally—before I could convince him they weren’t all redundant to his “double special day” on January 1st.
So, for the first time in a while, I paused to really think. I stopped packing lunches and paying bills and punching away at emails on my phone to sit down and reflect on how lucky my family is to usher in four new beginnings over the same 365-day period.
I’ve given up on as many New Year’s resolutions as I’ve made, every year another failed attempt at meeting some arbitrary metric: lose five pounds, meditate for 10 minutes a day, keep my inbox at zero. But what if having a New Year’s celebration every few months meant we didn’t have to make resolutions at all anymore?
What if we took the start of each cultural calendar year as an opportunity to set smaller goals and take stock of all the little victories we’d ordinarily overlook?
What if I spent some time during the Rosh Hashanah school break talking to my kids about what we’d done over the past couple of weeks to be kind, and what we could do in the days before Diwali to be even more thoughtful or caring?
What if, during Diwali, we considered all the new and interesting experiences we’d had since Rosh Hashanah, and brainstormed other cool things we wanted to try before New Year’s Day?
And what if, on January 1st (after blowing out my son’s birthday candles, of course), we considered what we’d done since Diwali to make ourselves proud, and what we could maybe try harder at before collecting our little red envelopes for Chinese New Year?
What if these four calendars—my family’s multicultural forcing mechanism—reminded us to be both grateful and excited for all the small things we experience every day?
In the course of our busy lives, we too rarely take the time to reflect on the mini-milestones of the recent past or contemplate those that lie just within reach. But I’ve got four opportunities on my 2018 calendar to help me do just that, and I plan to use this new approach to explain the relationship between them to my kids.
How lucky for me that those opportunities just happen to involve bubbly champagne, crispy turnip cakes, sweet apples and fragrant curry.
