IS IT STILL NEW YEAR?

It is now January 4, 2014 and I am still being blessed with New Year's greetings prayers and best wishes for all kinds of things. Hurray, already.  Actually, I have been fighting a crazy sore throat for over one week now and I am wondering if I will survive this whole thing.  So, I am glad that the year is beginning on a negative note because hopefully that will change quickly and I won't have anything more to worry about for the next 355 days.  That would be cool.
I go through this greeting quandary every single year.  For how long do I have to be polite and greet people with a "Happy New Year" blessing?  It could get rather long and quite convoluted in the neighborhood where we live where about 35 or 40% of the people are on the Chinese calendar.  So just about the time when I start to decide that I have exhausted the politeness quotient of the Gregorian calendar, I'm back in the environment of the Chinese calendar.  Now, it really doesn't mean much to me on the off years when it is not my turn to wonder what my personality is, or should be, according to the animal of the Zodiac under which I was born.  What really gets to me is the nagging reminder that one more year has passed and I am still fighting the battle of the bulge.  Shouldn't once be enough?
So, tomorrow is January 5.  No more Mr. Nice Guy.  "Hello!" it is and the devil take the hindmost.  The blessings have all of about two more hours of shelf life for the year.

Arghh!  You're not going to believe this.  It is still Christmas season and worse yet, our Orthodox friends are just warming up for the "real" thing in their Church.  I was just in one of their business establishments today and it was all Happy, Happy with Baby Jesus who is going to be born on January 7 this year.  I am so glad that I have age on my side.  I got invited to Midnight Celebration of the Divine Eucharist, and I used my advancing chronological debility as a dodge.  Hey, wouldn't you?  

Now, tomorrow, the day before the feast of the Magi, the Three Kings, is going to be another one of those great massive Mexican foodie days...Tamales of all sizes and all shades of the same basic taste and consistency plus the "Rosco de Los Reyes", a circular cake with tiny figurines of baby Jesus embedded.  If you get a piece with the baby Jesus in it, you HAVE to treat the whole village to celebrate your blessing.  I'm thinking that I had better find a church full of Irish immigrants who have already taken down their Christmas lights and have begun drinking quarts of coffee in order to be ready for work on Monday. 

The wonderful part about all this cultural diversity living is that you never stop celebrating.  You never know when one year ends and when the other begins.  In the Christian world alone we never know when Jesus was really born nor when He did a bunch of other stuff, like Die and Resurrect.  There are too many intersecting calendars.

It's not just the religious stuff that gets fuzzy.  Just look at what we've done here in the good ol' US of A.  The children of a certain age can't tell you when Flag Day is; they can't tell you when Washington's birthday is; nor Lincoln's; nor when Memorial Day is.  (Do we still  have Memorial Day?)  If it's not on a Monday or a Friday, we don't know when it happened.  Except for Independence Day.  For those of you below the age of 50, Independence Day is the Old Fashioned Name for The Fourth of July.

I hope you all have that straight now.  Next year on January 1 I am going to write a resolution that starting January 2 there are to be no Happy New Year's Greetings except in the year when the Chinese Zodiac says that it is the year of the OX.  Yay!
By the time that rolls around I will have pushed up enough daisies to really exuberantly decorate the margins of this great blog.

HOW MANY WAYS CAN YOU GET A YEAR OLDER?OLDER

I always ask myself this question at this time of the year.  It is an especially interesting question because on the surface it sounds so silly.  Yet, if you allow yourself some freedom of thought you can have some fun with it.  There are actually several answers to it.  Really.  Sit back, relax and bear with me.
1. Easy one.  Every day that you live, you get one year older because then every day is the one year anniversary of the same day last year.  That is, if you've already lived at least one year already.
2. Easier.  Easier because all you have to do is to count your birthday and New Year's Day as one each.
3. Easy, but tricky.  It requires that you be Chinese.  You have your birthday; You have the Gregorian calendar New Year's Day; You also have Chinese New Year.
4. Not so easy, but faster.  You are born on December 31.  So that's two years in a 24 hour span.  Not bad.  You may want to revert to # 1 so you'd have more to celebrate.
5. Horrible.  Your born on New Year's Day.  If you're a party hound, you have to do something about getting yourself a system.  Otherwise, you'll be short on the celebrations and you'll be sober all the time.  Bummer!  Of course, you could always adopt # 1.
6. Real tricky.  If you're rich, you could play games with the International Date line.  Like some of you who are reading this from Siberia.  Always cross the Date line in the direction that helps you celebrate more.  In leap years you can reverse your travel by going the other way to keep things a little more in your favor.  In fact, if you work and live far enough east of the Date line, you would have many opportunities to compensate, depending on whether or not you like to party.
7. Not only Real Tricky, but over the moon expensive.  Get on a super fast space ship and whip around the ole blue ball at 27,000 MPH's for five years.  You, ll never get old.  Then you can go to #1 to make up for lost time.
I'll bet you think I made this up.  I can honestly say that I did not.  I have actually had some version of this study swirling around in my gourd for some years now.  This, after all, is serious stuff.  I mean, I'm still on the quest for finding out how to reverse that whole trend of find how to celebrate more because it means that you're getting closer to ,,, Hummm, what was that again?
My two sons (oops, Mama's not going to like that) -- OUR two sons have an interesting thing going...For one month every year they are the "same" age.  We hear about it every single year.  So, not you know that I did not make any of this stuff up.  It's a true life, lived experience.
I could go on with my experiences of telecommuting across all kinds of time zones, but I'll spare it for when I will come up with another writer's block!
I've been sitting on it now for years!