A New Year, Hurrah!

2017 at last.  The glorious new year when, apparently, nobody famous will die - because, like, that's 2016's bag, like, and 2017 just isn't into that celebrity death gig, is it?  That seems to be consensus of 'opinion' on Twitter, at least.  I can't help but feel that a lot of people are going to be disappointed once the celebrities start dying again.  New Year or not, I'm still not making any resolutions and I'm refusing point blank to make any predictions: Brexit and President-elect Trump have rammed home how bad I am at the latter.    The only thing I will say is that, in 2017, I intend finding a way to work less - I definitely need more time to myself.  Indeed, despite a large part of my recent time off being taken up with Christmas, I've still managed to advance various of the projects I'm currently working on more in less than two weeks than I have in the past year.  So productive has the Christmas season been, that I'm more reluctant than ever to let it go, this bank holiday being my last day of freedom.

But, although we might have entered a new year, strictly speaking, we haven't left the Christmas season - it is still Christmas until Twelfth Night.  Yeah, you've guessed it, I'm back on my annual beef about our failure to properly respect the Christmas season.  It is, after all, meant to be a twelve day celebration (thirteen, if you include Christmas Eve).  That's right TV stations and newspapers, it doesn't end with the dawn of New Year's Day, (when they all seem to drop their seasonal branding).  Indeed, today the BBC refused to acknowledge even that it was a bank holiday, reverting to its regular weekday schedule.  Only Channel Five, to its credit, retained its Christmas idents today.  The fact is that until at least the English Civil War, Twelfth Night was almost as big a celebration as Christmas Day.  Now it is marked only by exhortations to remember to take your decorations down.  (Quite where this 'tradition' originates is a mystery, as, traditionally, lights and decorations stayed up until Candlemas, In February, in order to bring some much needed brightness and cheer to the depths of Winter.  A tradition which continues to this day in some parts of Northern Europe).  The older I get, the less I understand why, having made such a fuss about it during the run up, people seem to be in so much haste to get Christmas over with and forget about it.  That's the trouble with the modern Christmas: it is all about the expectation rather than the experience of the event.  Ah well, back to bloody work tomorrow.