When does your New Year start?

[Jenett]

I was thinking about all the times we have a new start - do you use January 1 as your fresh start? Do you follow a ritual year that does something else? (Samhain, Yule, the flooding of the Nile? something else?)

[Jenett]

I was thinking about all the times we have a new start - do you use January 1 as your fresh start? Do you follow a ritual year that does something else? (Samhain, Yule, the flooding of the Nile? something else?)

I think of my personal ritual new year as starting on September 22nd (my birthday, also usually fall equinox), and running through solstice (December 22), where those three months are my period of harvesting the previous goals, then reflection and figuring out what the next things I want to focus on are.

My actual ritual year has Samhain (October 31st) as the end of the old year, a fallow liminal time where we don't make big new changes if we can help it until Yule (December 22nd) and then working on articulating the goals for the coming year around about December 22nd and beginning to grow them by Imbolc (February 2nd)

I keep a massive spreadsheet where I track what I'm doing (partly to catch chronic medical stuff going downhill early in the process because a lot of my stuff is 'Oh, I just noticed my lungs are throwing fits and now I can't walk across a room' and that is .. much easier to fix when I catch it in week 1. This year I rearranged that spreadsheet to start on Yule, so I can do better breakdown sabbat to sabbat and by lunar month, as well as by calendar month.

And this year, I'm moving apartments around the calendar change of year (starting tomorrow, the 29th, the actual tenancy starts January 1, and the movers are moving most of my things January 4th.) And that's obviously going to be a big new change (I'm moving very near my current apartment, so things like my commute aren't changing, but a bunch of 'how do I run my household' can shift or will need to shift.)

[ehbowen]

I was thinking about all the times we have a new start - do you use January 1 as your fresh start? Do you follow a ritual year that does something else? (Samhain, Yule, the flooding of the Nile? something else?)

Every day.



Seriously, Baptists don't generally observe much of a liturgical calendar. We pay close attention to Passion Week and some churches I've been part of have observed the Advent season with candles and such but, other than that--not so much. From a civil standpoint, January 1st works well enough for me, and for a personal standpoint my birthday. I'm also rather partial to observances of June the 18th...and its antipode, December the 18th.

[Kylara]

I was thinking about all the times we have a new start - do you use January 1 as your fresh start? Do you follow a ritual year that does something else? (Samhain, Yule, the flooding of the Nile? something else?)

I sort of think of both Yule and Jan 1 as the new year.  I start my calendar planning on Jan 1 (because I often use a traditionally published calendar as part of my system...this year I'm going all published with a fancy Desire Map Planner), and this covers my day to day stuff as well as big yearl-long goals.

But I also think of Yule as the start of the earth year I guess you could call it.  I think of the cycles of nature as 'starting' at Yule (or more properly ending at Samhain...so starting somewhere in there).  But then again, that is an even more circular thing in my head, so I don't tend to stop and think "Oh its Pagan New year"

[Donal2018]

I was thinking about all the times we have a new start - do you use January 1 as your fresh start? Do you follow a ritual year that does something else? (Samhain, Yule, the flooding of the Nile? something else?)

Yes, January 1st for more worldly stuff. I am working on becoming more familiar with the Wheel of the Year and Celtic beginnings and endings of seasons, festivals, and years.

A main secular celebration for me is the start and end of the school year. I was sort of a professional student for a number of years in my younger days. The school calendar was my year.

I was part time at the University, so the year really began for me in September as the start of the school year, the beginning of the Fall Semester, the break in Winter Session as mid-year, and Spring Semester as the second half.

This secular school year is still a normal part of my pattern. As I say, I am also trying to incorporate the Wheel of the Year more into things for myself and to feel closer to Nature and more Natural cycles, moons, solstices, equinoxes.

[SatAset]

I was thinking about all the times we have a new start - do you use January 1 as your fresh start? Do you follow a ritual year that does something else? (Samhain, Yule, the flooding of the Nile? something else?)

In the temple I belong to, the New Year is calculated according to the Rising of the Star Sirius (Sopdet in ancient Egyptian).  That happens in the first week of August. 

I also see January 1st as a secular New Year. 

[Sefiru]

I was thinking about all the times we have a new start - do you use January 1 as your fresh start? Do you follow a ritual year that does something else? (Samhain, Yule, the flooding of the Nile? something else?)

Add another one for January 1

I also tend to see the start of September as a beginning-time, due to being the start of the school year (at least in north america) and thus having that association reinforced throughout my childhood. Also it's coming off the hottest part of summer and is about when I feel like doing things again.

[Chatelaine]

I was thinking about all the times we have a new start - do you use January 1 as your fresh start? Do you follow a ritual year that does something else? (Samhain, Yule, the flooding of the Nile? something else?)

The Orthodox liturgical year starts with Indiction (1 September). It goes nicely with the sense of renewal I still get at the start of the academic year. The civic New Year of 1 January, as well as my birthday, are other 'reset points' in the year.

[Aisling]

I was thinking about all the times we have a new start - do you use January 1 as your fresh start? Do you follow a ritual year that does something else? (Samhain, Yule, the flooding of the Nile? something else?)

January 1st for most things secular.  My day job is the only exception - we run on a calendar that has every 'month' beginning on a Sunday.  So, work new year is on December 30th this year.

Technically, my spiritual new year begins on Samhain.  However, the period between Samhain and Yule always tends to have a feeling of disconnect, suspension and liminality to me.  During that time, the focus is to first wrap up any unfinished business from the previous year and after that, to reflect and plan for the following year.  No new work gets started during this period unless it's an absolute emergency.   Yule marks the end of the new year,'s season and the start of active work. 

[Ashmire]

I was thinking about all the times we have a new start - do you use January 1 as your fresh start? Do you follow a ritual year that does something else? (Samhain, Yule, the flooding of the Nile? something else?)

Though I acknowledge the secular New Year on January 1st for convenience like everyone else, I have never really felt it was a good day for me to start or restart anything.

  For one thing, I can probably count on one hand the number of times in my life when I have not been suffering some kind of illness, at least the typical seasonal virus if not anything worse, on that day, and it has been many years since I actually bothered staying up till midnight to ring in the calendar New Year.

Way back when I was a wee baby pagan, I found I also didn't really quite click with the Wiccan Wheel of the Year, though I tend to loosely acknowledge those days in some way, and somewhere, perhaps out of a hazy construction that "Hey, the Moon is supposed to be important to pagans, why aren't we following the Lunar Year more?" coupled with an interest in anime at that time making me more open to Asian things in a vague general way, I decided that I was going to celebrate Chinese New Year as "my" New Year.

Now I have at least one of my Powers for whom that actually makes sense, (besides being the time when I start being able to shake off the winter blahs a tiny bit) but I also have Egyptian gods as well, and I did in fact feel a kind of intuitive energetic shift around Wep Renpet, so I guess for the time being I will keep both of those dates as important days.  I'm glad to notice in this thread I don't seem to be the only person with more than one.

[EclecticWheel]

I was thinking about all the times we have a new start - do you use January 1 as your fresh start? Do you follow a ritual year that does something else? (Samhain, Yule, the flooding of the Nile? something else?)

As may be obvious from my religious descriptor my New Year begins with Advent.  This is also true for my personal cycles of prayer and ritual.

Communally we begin preparing ourselves for Christ's coming through reflection on that mystery through the liturgy and personal penance and introspection.

In my personal cycles of ritual I begin enacting the heart longing for the beloved, undergoing rejection and abuse by others (but not from the beloved), and in the end affirming her uniqueness, worth, beauty, and purity, though she does not yet find the beloved at this time of year...she finds these strengths in herself.

For practical goals I observe the new year at January 1st.

[Mellee]

My actual ritual year has Samhain (October 31st) as the end of the old year, a fallow liminal time where we don't make big new changes if we can help it until Yule (December 22nd) and then working on articulating the goals for the coming year around about December 22nd and beginning to grow them by Imbolc (February 2nd)

Same (with different dates)! But also, here in Aotearoa NZ we celebrate the Māori New Year when Matariki (the Pleiades star cluster) rises in winter (usually early June), and it's become part of my ritual year - typically involving a week or so of festivities between Samhain and Yule.

This is when I set my New Year's resolutions, which last year involved speaking them before blowing giant bubbles with soap mixture & a hoop, and then watching the wind float them off into the sky.

[IceAngie]

I was thinking about all the times we have a new start - do you use January 1 as your fresh start? Do you follow a ritual year that does something else? (Samhain, Yule, the flooding of the Nile? something else?)

I was going to say January 1, but then I realized I start doing things and planning for the new year sometime mid-february, and actually start the year in March, so I'll go with March 1 for the work year.

My ritual year starts in Yule, June 21.

[PerditaPickle]

I was thinking about all the times we have a new start - do you use January 1 as your fresh start? Do you follow a ritual year that does something else?

Historically I've tended to use January 1st generally (and I've not really had a ritual year to speak of), but without much in the way of success, so I'm thinking of re-jigging how I view this.

I'm not sure of the reason for the lact of success, but it could be a variety of things (the Christmas decorations are still up for a few more days post January 1st so it doesn't feel as though the old year's fully finished off at that point; it can be kind of a "doldrums" post-Christmas so there's a lack of impetus to start off new stuff; there's a fairly well established expectation, almost, that New Years Resolutions don't really work and will have gone by the wayside within a few weeks or so; January's thought of as a long month to be endured and survived, rather than a time for necessarily getting stuff done ...).

Instead, I'm thinking of trying Imbolc this year, and I'll see how that works out for me.  Yeah, that seems like it might make a sort of sense and have some potential.

[PerditaPickle]

I created another version of this thread over on the temporary .org TC site earlier this year, and I wanted to capture those responses so (with Darkhawk's okay via Discord), I'm about to copy and paste them here.  I hope no-one minds.

I asked:-

So, I'm interested to hear from other members:-
~ what's your tradition?
~ when is New Year in your tradition?
(~ and do you stick to the New Year in your tradition, or do you also have your own personal New Year on a separate date?)