EDITOR’S CORNER
This is a strange in-between week at The Rockdale Reporter.
Probably not many businesses in Rockdale—and, hey, we’re a business in case you didn’t know—are so attuned to the rhythm of the week as are we.
We do certain things every Monday and certain things every day of the week.
We really do certain things on Tuesday. That’s our “put the paper together in a frantic, controlled (well sometimes controlled) rush day.”
Also known as “check your blood pressure day.”
And this year, Christmas fell on Tuesday.
Which created a whole bunch of confusion as to what day we were living in.
For one, it means this newspaper you are either holding or flipping right and left on your smart phone was cobbled together before Christmas, knowing full well that nobody would read it until after Christmas.
It seems like this ought to be our Christmas issue. But it’s not. That was last week.
This one is kind of stuck out there in between Christmas and New Year’s.
And that got me to thinking. (You can take that as either a lead-in to what follows or a warning).
You know there couldn’t possibly be any two holidays more different than New Year’s and Christmas.
Most of us get both days off and that’s about where the similarities stop.
New Year’s commemorates a point in time and space. Christmas commemorates a point outside time and space.
What have we accomplished at New Year’s? This-spinning ball we live on, composed of good, bad and everything in between, has arrived at that point again.
It’s the same point in space the earth arrived at last year and will occupy next year.
There’s really nothing special about that point. We just chose it as the time to roll over the yearly odometer numbers once more.
I say “we,” but nobody asked me about what date constitutes the first one of a new year. Did they ask you? I think I know the answer to that one.
At what point do we arrive when we observe Christmas? Can I wait until the end of the column to get into that?
I once went to a party in suburban Austin about this time of the year.
The house was prettily decorated and the mood was festive. It was filled with highly-intelligent people, including UT professors, attorneys and a couple who were so smart even after they explained what they did I couldn’t understand it.
And no, I don’t know what I was doing there. I think I was someone’s science fair project.
There was a banner hanging over the front window. It said: “Happy Solstice.”
And I thought “how unbearably sad”.
Somehow it took the edge off any pretense of this gathering being special.
Wow, we made it around the sun again. Good for us. Happy Solstice to you. Professor can you say that again in a language people used after 1400 AD? Pass the cheese dip.
It’s true that New Year’s does give us something of an opportunity to make a fresh start, to lose that weight, read that book, look forward to putting a disappointing year behind us and head for new horizons.
Do we do it? Yes, some do and I congratulate you. Keep it up.
But all too often I—uh, I mean we—find the new year very much like the one we just left. After all, every one of those old years we just can’t wait to leave started out as a new year too.
Depressing? Not really, because of the holiday we just celebrated and that’s where my thought about Christmas comes in.
Maybe it’s just a feeling you get when you have one of those “in limbo weeks,” sort of lost in space, hung out to dry between the two holidays, like this past week at The Rockdale Reporter.
At New Year’s we are one year closer to death.
At Christmas we are one year closer to life.
The real kind.
And that makes it really a “Happy New Year.”
- Log in or Subscribe to post comments.