How to see a new year

An end or a beginning?

A great curiosity to us Northern Hemisphere People is, “How do you celebrate Christmas in the SUMMER?”

It’s not so much the dissonance of feting the holiday during warm weather; there are plenty of balmy places throughout the Upper Half of the Globe where a sunshine-y Christmas season is more amusing than puzzling (hand-painted ornaments from Florida depicting Santa Claus on the beach, and what have you).

But there’s a specific weirdness to us Top-of-the-World-Dwellers to think that our Southern counterparts’ holiday season literally takes place in the summer—that sticky-slow span of indistinguishable weeks, whose youthful spontaneous spirit inspires frenzied revelry, frivolity, even debauchery.

Not exactly a season that excites one to cozy up with extended family making small-talk about when you’re going to “settle down.” If there’s any season that is not about settling anything, it’s summer.

So, the other day, I joined in the hemisphere-wide interrogation and asked my Argentinian Spanish teacher, “What’s it like having Christmas in the middle of SUMMER!?”

Clearly she’s been asked this one million fifty-five times in her life, so she saw it coming: “Yeah, I know, ‘how do we eat heavy fruitcake and sit in front of the fire and sing about the snow in summer?’”

I actually know the answer to this question because I’ve lived it! I experienced a barbecue Christmas when I lived in Chile, and subsequently experienced the second-hand torture of Santa Claus bundled up in the main plaza roasting in 105-degree heat.

Christmas week in the south of Chile, with my Stone Age digital camera in tow

A Christmas barbecue in Chile, 2009 (where are they now??)

But I wanted her take as someone who’d grown up with summer solstice holidays as the norm, not a novelty.

I asked about theology of it all. Europe and North American Christians put a big ol’ emphasis on the “light in the dark” message of the season (one that my church, along with many others, are reevaluating because of the damaging linguistic reinforcement that darkness = bad and lightness = good).

Andrea took a pause to gather her memories, and then started telling me about the more jubilant and lighthearted culture around Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere. “We’re outside, we’re on vacation, it’s a big party.” Just another fun day during a whole stretch of fun days.

“But New Year’s is the holiday that feels especially different,” she told me. “In the North, it’s dark, it’s cold. You’re inside. It’s quiet. So, the New Year is more meditative, contemplative…and it emphasizes the closing of the year. There’s a stronger sense of reflection and looking back on the year, rather than looking forward.”

I think that’s true!

She contrasted that with a Southern New Year: “In the height of summer, we emphasize the NEW year. There’s not as much looking back; it’s way more about looking forward. With all the picnics and beach days and late-night parties going on, it really feels like a fresh start. Summer doesn’t invite as much quiet reflection.”

I think that’s interesting!

It really shifted my whole brain for the rest of the day. Broadly speaking, one culture sees December 31 as an end; another sees it as a beginning. The North is putting the past twelve months to sleep; the other is waking up the next twelve.

View of the Andes from my home in Santiago, a sight that always reminded me of new beginnings

In chatting with Andrea, I soaked in how much agency we all have in looking at time-established holidays, traditions, even whole seasons the way we WANT to—not necessarily the way we’ve been taught to.

This might sound very basic to you, but it’s not to me. I look to the rhythms of the year in order to maintain my own, and I follow nature’s instruction so as to embrace the inevitable, ephemeral cycles of any given year: loss, decay, renewal, steadiness.

I also appreciate the gentle teachings of the Church Calendar, which carves out specific times for melancholy, for paucity, and for abundance.

Advent, for example, is one of the less-cheerful times of the year, characterized by waiting, longing, and cautious hope. But this year, I’ve rebelled against it by letting myself just be really happy—something that has never come particularly easy for me.

It’s a small shift in self-trust: I’m choosing to see this season differently.

Funny how many times in life we can learn the exact same lesson. After my conversation with Andrea, I looked through my old journal from my year in Santiago:

What is a Southern Hemisphere Christmas supposed to symbolically reveal to me about a homeless baby born in Palestine to give the human soul its worth?

For a while I thought “Not much!” Who needs hope in the summer? Who needs a small glow of love and peace to enter the symbolic darkness when you're at the pool gorging on mojitos and guac?

This Christmas didn't carry with it that same need for hope that a -33 degree windchill that Christmas in Chicago does.

But this Christmas was a CELEBRATION, a sweet, singing, drunken, exhilarating celebration of family outside of your family and of music which I tend to think of as God's voice directly, except for Linkin Park and some songs by Duran Duran...and pie and frisbee and definitely ice cream, and Jim Carrey movies and tons of laughter.

I walked home because I have new music on my iPod which allows me to walk for hours. I watched the Andes turn from magenta to dark purple, casting all kinds of crazy shadows on the fully-bloomed jacaranda trees.

The thick clouds looked like fire behind them and for the first time I had to have a debate with myself as to whether I preferred Winter Andes or Summer Andes. Considering that Winter Andes positively SPARKLE and that I prefer winter to summer...this question alone was huge progress for me.

Because the thing is, I'm not so down on summer this year after all. In fact, I'm really enjoying it. In fact, Christmas on a roasting hot afternoon is completely redeemable, as are most things so I'm coming to find out.

That year, I learned that I could choose to see the other side of something I thought was one-dimensional. I learned that even a flat shape is 3D, and there are always multiple conclusions to something that seems so obvious.

I learned that whenever I started to slip into “That’s just the way it is” thinking…I catch myself; there’s always so much more going on.

There’s an entirely different season on the other side of the world, and a different set of stars, and a different view of the exact same day.

As I would later journal years later after one of the most awful days in our earth’s recent history:

‘Someone has always clinked a cocktail glass in one hemisphere as someone loses a home in another while someone falls in love in the same apartment building where someone grieves. The fact that suffering, mundanity, and beauty coincide is unbearable and remarkable.’

It didn’t sink in the first time. Or the third time. Or the 968th time.

I keep meaning to get a Southern Cross constellation tattoo to remind me that there’s always another way to see something. One world’s end is another’s beginning.

For now, I have my sweet conversation with Andrea to rotate my thoughts a half-turn to the left—an angle where “this” and “that” smudge together to form a “could,” and I’m not so sad to let go of what’s past because there might be jacaranda blossoms and music in the park to take its place.

If you are in a contemplative and closing-the-year mood, here are 3 journal prompts I often use this week, when I merrily forget which day it is.

If you’re feeling more celebratory lately (or even just holiday-agnostic or apathetic), then I invite you to join me in embracing whatever feelings come up for you right this very week: I can guarantee you that someone else, at least in some part of the world, is doing the same.

P.S. Registration for my writing retreat in North Carolina over May 2-4, 2025 is open now! It’s fabulously remote, but an easy Hickory Hop bus ride from the Charlotte airport. We’ll talk about book-writing and publishing and editing and refining and much more chill subjects than that—and it will be so FUN!