Are you aware that the calendar and the clock are fictions? Believing in them is simply an agreement we have made, a means to exert a semblance of order, as best our human minds are capable, on the complex cyclicality of the whirling gears of the celestial bodies. We mapped them with numbers we found pleasing. A day, roughly the period between sunrise and sunrise, is a real thing, something we can experience, but there's no reason, none whatsoever, that we declare it to be 24 hours long. A month--the period from full moon to full moon--is a real thing. A year--let's call it winter solstice to winter solstice--is as well. But they don't map onto each other with the comfortably comprehensible elegance that our clocks and calendars imply. The lunar cycle isn't exactly 29 days, and it certainly doesn't exist in obvious-to-human-eyes phase with the not-exactly-365-day year. We say twelve months, but we've divorced our months from the moon that inspired them. Twelve months in a year? It's closer to twelve-point-five.
But to disregard the calendar because, in our demand that the nearby universe fit our need for easily comprehensible order, we have created a fiction is to a certain degree to miss the point. The calendar is an agreement, roughly world-wide at this point, that we will order the parade of our days in this manner. It could have been different, and in some cultures, actually has been. Our seven-day week connects to no natural phenomenon at all. (Surely it exists because, in a particular creation myth deeply important in our culture, the creator rested on the seventh day.) We declare there to be twelve months in a year? Okay. We put the new year not on the winter solstice, as it naturally should be, but a handful of days later? Fine. (I suspect we placed our New Year's Day there in order to be exactly one week after Christmas.) This is how we've decided to do it? I'll play along, more or less.
I map my own writing year onto the calendar, after all. The two weeks before the calendrical New Year are my yearly sabbatical. The new year that matters more to me, the energetic new year, I therefore celebrate in my actions away from the action of writing, which has for so long defined me.
In my center, I know the solstice to be the true start to the new year. But the part of me that exists in agreed-upon conversation with the world is happy to say that today is different from yesterday, to mark it with a new number, and to wish everyone I speak to a Happy New Year.