Dear Friend,

It was partly Geri's fault. On New Year's Eve our faithful volunteer who mails out our books and resources from Oregon emailed me: "Well, tomorrow night is new year's eve so another year is completed and a whole new one begins. Doesn't seem very profound. Is that just media hype or is it important? Man seems to like the pomp and parties that special occasions bring." And of course she is right: it is just a date on the calendar.

The Romans originally started their calendar on the first day of March, and even today some traditional calendars start sometime in March, so that is why his seventh month was September (Sept being seven, Oct being eight). We owe our calendar to Julius Caesar, who proclaimed January 1 as the first day of the year and kept the old names for the months.

It was also partly my fault, as we had spent the days after Christmas packing up half the house, including my office, so new floor coverings could be installed on December 28th. Then we had to put it all back together again! After that, neither Vivien or I could muster much enthusiasm for a celebration of the New Year.

After Geri's email the words of the heading above kept running through my mind: "What makes the New Year new? What makes the old year old?" I knew the words were from a poem but that was all. I entered them in Google, with little joy. I seemed to remember having used the poem before, maybe on a printed calendar we used to distribute in the 70s and 80s, but I could not find one in our archive with that poem on it. Then I thought it was probably from a magazine and checked the January issues of several. Finally I found it -- on the back cover of a daily devotional magazine dated January 1985.

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So here is the poem by James Dillet Freeman: