Why are we celebrating?

The year 2014 now dawns upon us. However, if there’s a celebration that I’ve never understood it’s New Year’s Eve. The hype, the parties, the resolutions have all never made sense to me. People getting excited to the point where you’d think the whole make-up of the universe is going to change at midnight.

Fundamentally, New Year’s Eve is the celebration of the year past and the welcoming of a new one. So, what exactly are we celebrating? What makes a year? At New Year’s Eve we are celebrating the fact that the Earth has completed one more full revolution around the sun. The passing of 12 more months, or 52 more weeks, or 365 more days, or 8,765.81 more hours, or 31,556,926 more seconds, and welcoming the re-occurrence of that same dosage of time.

Then there are the resolutions: those either die by February or are vague enough to be easily cheated. Hearing resolutions is always entertaining as you know people will never stick to them.

‘I will exercise everyday’- that’s a common one. Bench pressing the bedsheets in the morning doesn’t count. ‘I will try something new every day’ is also prevalent, however if you’re unimaginative enough to use that as a resolution, I doubt you’re imaginative enough to think of 365 different things.

However, the most daunting resolution of all, comes from a New Year’s episode of Friends. ‘I won’t say anything sarcastic’, much like Chandler, I don’t think I could make it past two days.