Burn It!
How to create a new ritual for entering the new year.
A Note for You, If You’re Having A Bad Day
How do you celebrate the new year? I’ve heard that it can be a difficult holiday for people. There’s this imagined New Years Eve party, where everyone is wearing sequins and tulle (and who can say what has happened to the coats of all these people, because it’s absolutely cold outside, and those dresses and silky shirts are absolutely not weather-appropriate), and there are little foods to eat on sticks (things with dates, figs, prosciutto, that kind of affair), and everyone has slick hair and infinite flutes filled with infinite champagne, and at midnight there’s a mystery about who everyone is going to kiss, but everyone does have a kiss, and I think there’s also a disco ball involved. I don’t know who came up with this New Years Eve party, but whereas I know you know what I’m talking about, someone with a lot of influence must have invented it. It’s an amazing shared mythology. I have searched for it.
One year, my sister and I went to a venue to see a concert, which seemed like the kind of place for the mythical party — but really, it stank like old vomit (Why was it OLD!? Hadn’t they thought to clean up the vomit BEFORE the concert? Or — were there people whose vomit just came out smelling old already? Or does vomit get old really quickly?), and no one was dancing, and I lost track of my sister immediately. I got a Lyft at 11:50 p.m. so I wouldn’t have to wait for one later, when I was sure there’d be a surge. At midnight, I asked the Lyft driver if he wanted to kiss, and he acted like he hadn’t heard me.
One year, I went to a house belonging to a friend from high school, and MY INTERNET CRUSH WAS THERE! He was drinking out of a mug with a happy face on it! Or maybe I was drinking out of that mug. One thing’s for sure: I was definitely drinking. I got too drunk. Everyone gathered in a well-lit living room to play theater games, and I took up too much space with my loudness. I didn’t impress my internet crush, I don’t think. I did try to light a firework in my hand, because weren’t there supposed to be fireworks on New Year’s Eve? But, luckily, I was too drunk to make it work, and a kind person who barely knew me volunteered to drive me home. I didn’t kiss anyone.
One year, the last year I was in Portland for New Year’s, I bought one of those sparkly, sequined dresses. It itched and was way too short. We didn’t leave my sister’s living room that year, but I put on the dress anyway and tried to force everyone to role play the kind of party that I was looking for. That was OK. We cast my sister’s dog in the role of a hunk, and he did a great job. I probably did kiss him, but not at midnight. We went to bed early.
Basically, I spent all of my twenties seeking out the New Year’s Eve party that was supposed to make New Year’s Eve fun, and I never found it. I am sure that there are parties that LOOK like this kind of party in real life, but I imagine they’re not as actually fun as they’re supposed to be. Is that midnight kiss ever as cinematic as scripted? And why are you supposed to kiss someone at midnight anyway?
A few years ago, when I was in the habit of going to this Unitarian Church by myself up in the suburbs, I attended a New Year’s service. Everyone was given a piece of red paper, and we were supposed to write down something we wanted to let go of in the new year. Then, we went up to the front of the congregation, and we burned it. (From what I can gather, this is a reiki tradition called a Burning Bowl Ceremony.) It was a special kind of paper that sort of floated up in a ghost of ash when it burned, and watching other people do it looked symbolic — cinematic, even, in the way the midnight kiss was supposed to be. It struck me that maybe I’d been thinking about New Year’s all wrong. Maybe it wasn’t about kissing or drinking or dancing or planning. Maybe it was about burning.
It’s not as simple as that, you’re right. But this was the ritual I’d wanted, and I knew it immediately — that kind of recognition you get in the first ten minutes of a movie you can tell you’re going to want to watch again. That year, I’d had a significant breakup with my closest friend. It had crushed me in a way that no romantic breakup ever had. And so I wrote her name on my piece of red paper. I held the paper close to my chest, I whispered the words, “I love you,” and then I walked up in front of a bunch of (mostly elderly) strangers, watched it glow momentarily wild, and then disappear.
I don’t know if the ritual of burning her name allowed me to move on, but it can’t have hurt. I did move on. Moving on isn’t an event; it’s a series of choices, steps you take away and away and away, until something is in the distance. At the very least, the New Year burning was a leap. It was a choice to move away from something that I needed to leave behind.
The next January, we were almost a full year into the pandemic. My girlfriend Kat and I hadn’t touched in months and months, but we did meet up outside and sit six feet apart and have masked conversations regularly. January is a cold time to meet up outside, so we landed on an idea about having a bonfire in the backyard on New Year's Day. The fire was already there, I thought, so why not bring out some paper, and write down some things we wanted to let go of? Luke liked this idea, too, and he joined us. It was probably like six degrees outside, and our hands froze as we wrote. The letting go tasted different when I did it with people I loved. I have to tell you the truth: I have no memory of what I wrote that second year of burning. I wrote a bunch of things: a list. The power of it that time was sitting in literal heaps of snow and ice, in silence, making a decision to move forward. If ice is about everything staying put, preserved, resting, still; fire is about motion, speed, change, newness. Could there be anything more appropriate for the day-shaped hinge that joins a dying year to a new one? It’s almost too on-the-nose. But not quite.
We had the fire again last year, and again, we burned lists. My daughter was not even two months old yet. I remember thinking about how at the fire the year before, I hadn’t believed pregnancy was in the cards for me. I’d planned on having a very different year than the one I ended up having. You don’t get to decide; not really. But a ritual creates space for you to show up for your life. And why not?
I have no idea what I’ll write to burn this year, although it is no longer a question that I will write something, and that I’ll burn it. I don’t even think Kat and I officially made a date to meet on New Year’s Day and have a fire, because this year, we knew we were going to do it. It is cemented. She sent me this poem Naomi Shihab Nye wrote in 1995 about burning the old year. Nye must know the ritual the way the UU Church people knew it — she knows about the special red paper. (As an aside, her last name is NYE! NEW YEARS’S EVE, anyone?!)
Burning the Old Year
BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.
So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.
Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.
Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.
If you haven’t found the thing that works for you on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day, I recommend a hard pivot, and choosing something new for yourself. There’s no need to kiss someone at midnight or have champagne if that isn’t lighting you up. Try this burning thing, maybe; or maybe do something totally different. Be a person who has tamales, or black-eyed peas. Maybe you will write a poem every New Years’ Day. Maybe you will take a walk. It helps to have a Thing, though; it helps to mark this time of year, as dark as it might be. There’s so little you get to control. For this reason, it matters how you mark your time, and how you celebrate it.
I’d love to know about your New Year’s rituals. Fill the comments with your stories and ideas! I’m here for them.
With Love,
Sophie
FALSE STARTS
I couldn’t get this letter going! Many of you are writers, and are interested in process, so I thought, since this particular letter had an unusual amount of wrong starts, I’d share with you a few of the ways I tried to find my way in, but failed.
TRY 1:
The calendar year is ending. For the past week, I’ve been celebrating fire and also ice. They’re emotionally opposite, but there’s always something similar in things that are diametrically opposed; they represent extremes, and because so many things are circular —
TAKE 2:
This is the last time I’ll write to you in 2022. I love the number 22 — it’s round and sweet and reminds me of my favorite word (“egg”). Taylor Swift wrote a song about 22, which is among my favorite songs by Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift’s 22 is wild and free and —
TAKE 3:
My house right now, incredibly, doesn’t have a fireplace. It looks like the kind of house that WOULD have a fireplace, and so I do daydream about finding one, somehow, some way, buried in the walls. This is a thing that happens in movies or on television, and I’ve even read about it happening in a magazine; it’s enough of a trope that it feels possible that in the story of my life, there might be a hidden fireplace.
There was a secret area behind the stove that Luke broke through with whatever manly hacking-away-at-walls tools he had on hand. He hacked and hacked at the wall until he discovered that back there, there was … nothing. There was a weird nada space where nothing belonged and nothing could really go. A few years in a row, we planted things back there with an aerogarden —
Parenting Paragraph
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything about T, because she’s toddling, and I honestly don’t completely know how to write about that. But I thought I’d show up here to share that she took her first steps two weeks ago, and it was while Luke was out of the house and taking WAY TOO LONG. He said he’d be gone four hours, but it had been FIVE HOURS ALREADY, with no end in sight. I was especially angry because we were having a little caroling party for the babies in our neighborhood, and I needed to clean and organize the rooms in the house where the people would be. It was a Saturday, and I’d been putting in a lot of extra hours on housework tasks. And I have to tell you: when T took her first steps, and Luke wasn’t there, my feeling was, “This is what you get, Luke. This is your punishment. YOU ARE MISSING THIS.” This was a terrible reaction to have, and I am not proud of it at all. But basically, there’s too much to do, and when you feel exhausted and unappreciated, revenge can feel like the next best thing to reciprocity and appreciation. It’s not a beautiful truth, but it is a true truth. (The walking is VERY cute. We’ve heard that when the baby starts walking, it progresses quickly, but that hasn’t so far been true for T. She’ll still only go about six paces, and doesn’t show interest in going farther.)
This Week in Sophie
Sammi and I have a toon in the annual Puzzles and Cartoons issue of The New Yorker:
And — would you consider joining a paid subscription tier of this newsletter? It keeps the newsletter alive. It CANNOT LIVE without you! (And also, there are two whole more issues PER WEEK to receive if you are open to paying for them! Think of the content! Incredible!)
I think I reply to all your pieces with this phrase, but here we go again: I love this so much!
Two initial thoughts:
1) I'm not religious, but I'm really drawn to churches - the spaces are lovely, and I love the idea of the community there. I've been toying with the idea of seeing if I can join a church just for the routine/ritual and the people, but I'm still thinking about it. I love this line - "I was in the habit of going to this Unitarian Church by myself up in the suburbs" - not sure what your situation is re religion, but it feels familiar to me, even if I haven't done it yet.
2) When I was younger, I found old love letters from the person I dated when I was 13/14, and I didn't want them any more. I burnt them with a friend, and it was cathartic. Your Hogmanay tradition feels similar, but probably full of less teenage angst!
My partner and I have tried to make our own Hogmanay traditions, and we've found two we really like so far.
One is having a nice dinner together and sitting and writing some lists of things we'd like to do in the new year, which then live on the fridge all year. There are four short lists, one of places we'd like to eat, places we'd like to visit, places we'd like to walk, and activities to do together. There are 12 things on each of these lists, ideally one for each month. The bigger list is habits that we'd like to take into the new year, more like your traditional resolutions. I've just spoken to him about this, and think we might be writing a list of things we'll be keeping in 2022 this year!
The second one is getting up really early, cycling to a hill, and watching the first sunrise of the new year. It's absolutely lovely, and I'm really looking forward to it this year. We've just moved, so are still working out where the best place to watch the sunrise will be, but I'm so excited, and really glad we started doing it.
I love the idea that you can celebrate things in a way that works for you, it's something I'm going to try carry with me as much as I can. Thank you again for a lovely newsletter.
I don't know why but I found this issue hilarious, maybe because I am a 74 year old woman, and although my short term memory is playing hide and seek once in a while, my long term memory is better than ever, and for the life of me I can't remember ever even going to a New Year's Party. Once I went to Times Square and that was fun, but I am pretty sure I have never kissed an unknown person or a crush on New Year's. I never really understood New Year's until I lived in Japan, and Eastern New Years are something else. But we've got Christmas for that, especially if you're not Christian. Oh well. Furthermore, how many Erins have worn a sequinned dress or tulle. I dig fireworks though. Happy New Year everyone. Bah, humbug.