Prompt: New Year

For many Pagans, the 'new year' comes around Samhain. For the rest of the world, the 'new year' starts a new calendar, with January 1st.
What is your personal take on the 'new year'? Do you honor the change in Oct-Nov, or do you wait until January like everyone else?

I celebrate the spiritual new year on the winter solstice. It just makes a lot more sense in my personal path than putting it on Samhain, or any other time. The idea of the new year falling on Yule isn't all that far-fetched, of course... plenty of modern pagans do the same, and the idea has historical roots. The commonly celebrated Wheel of the Year is a mix of both Germanic and Celtic holidays, ideas, and traditions. While the Celts placed their new year on Samhain, the Germanic calendar instead placed it on Yule. I have also met those who instead choose to place the New Year at Imbolc or Ostara - whatever works!

In my path, like many others, Yule is a time to celebrate the rebirth of the sun. So lining up the rebirth of the year here fits well. I associate Yule with midnight (opposite of Litha's high noon) and the new moon, both also new beginnings. Additionally, there's just something nice about putting a time of new beginnings at this cold, dark time. I also like that it lines up closely with the calendar new year, linking the 'mundane' calendar with the spiritual one. Yule is also when I first discovered paganism many years back, making it yet another way to link that passing of time, one year gone, another starting.

I wrote a little bit about celebrating the new year last week, but I didn't touch on a popular tradition - setting goals for the new year. I'm a firm believer that any minute of any day can be a new beginning if you need one. You don't have to wait for the new year, a new moon cycle, or anything else. Still, the new year is a handy time to look back on the past year, and to set long term goals for the next. So I've been spending the last few days looking back a bit, and working out goals for the year to come. Not ready to write more on that yet though, but there will probably be a post on that tomorrow or the day after... Until then, I wrote a bit about setting and actually achieving goals last year.