Whether or not you look at it as a religious holiday, Christmas is a celebration of Presence: you're surrounded by the community of your loved ones, having a good time together. In this country, what with Thanksgiving shortly beforehand, it's like a continuation of the "harvest festival" vibe of being thankful, but, this time around, we're even closer to the end of the year. We look at what happened in the past twelve months, good or bad, and we reflect on that, even if takes a few more weeks (or months) for those thoughts to really solidify. The New Year, however, is not about Presence: it's about Absence.

While we can plan all we want, none of us have any idea what's going to happen in 2020: before the year's over, this country will have a new president (perhaps), and before the decade's over our lives will certainly have been altered in ways that we can't begin to imagine. When people eat and drink a lot and party hard on Christmas, it's in the name of fun. When people do so on New Year's Eve, there's a bit of desperation to it: the old year didn't go perfectly, but you'll try your darndest to make sure the new year goes better. After all, that's what New Year's resolutions are for.

In Mary Poppins Opens the Door (the third book in the Mary Poppins series by P.L. Travers), there's a chapter in which the children witness fairy tale characters come to life in the "crack" (the gap) between the old year and the new. January 1st is a profoundly empty day, accentuated in this part of the world by how winter has just begun and the world will take a few months to be reborn. Such a thought can fill us with profound despair or profound hope. Let us choose the latter; after all, with an old year passed away, we have nothing to lose.