New Year's Rituals

Since I've been with S, New Year's Eve has become one of my more favorite holidays of the year.  I love new beginnings, fresh starts, opportunities to revisit old goals and set new intentions.  Typically, S's mom spends the holiday season with us in the city, so we usually take her out dancing at a low-key venue with salsa music.  Without the pressure to have to find some fabulous party or over the top way to ring in the new year, the occasion has really become simply an opportunity to spend time together, and for reflection and ritual.

This year, S's mom postponed her visit until after our little one is here.  So the two of us went about marking the occasion a little differently.  We began our preparations for 2013 over the weekend, by scrubbing down our house.  We cleaned out the freezer and sorted through the piles of baby stuff we've accumulated during the past few months.   On New Year's Eve, we started the evening by doing some of S's mom's favorite activities in the city, including visiting a famous Christmas tree, getting champagne truffles, checking out the holiday storefront windows, and going to a gorgeous cathedral to light some candles and say a few prayers.

We spent the later part of the evening having dinner with friends, and at midnight we ended up watching fireworks at a local park.  In a new ritual for me, our friends provided us each with 12 grapes, and instructed us to eat each one in the first 12 seconds after midnight while making a wish for each month of the new year.  It was fun to challenge myself to conjure up a different wish for each grape.  They mostly came to me in the form of single words.  I was overwhelmed with excitement, knowing that 2013 will be the year that we will begin our journey into parenthood.

On New Year's Day, we welcomed another new tradition when we cooked and ate a delicious dinner of black eyed peas with brown rice, kale and beets, a meal that is supposed to bring prosperity and wealth.  We capped off the week with our third annual new year's decadent pancake breakfast with one of our dearest friends in the city.

We constructed a start to the year with many, many opportunities to put wishes and hopes and dreams out in to the universe.  Maybe that's because there is so much uncertainty in our lives right now, so much anticipation and excitement and fear and a lack of clarity about what our lives will look like in just a few weeks.  I have no idea how my birth process will go, what will happen when our child emerges into the world, how being parents will impact us as individuals and as a couple, what it will be like to reconfigure our identities and our schedules and our priorities.  All I really anticipate is our lives are soon to be flipped upside down.  Even ordinary things like going to the grocery store or making plans to grab coffee with a friend won't look the same.

I'm ready for my life to change, and have been for many years.  So many of the parents I talk to tell me that being a parent is an amazing, hard and wonderful experience.  I'm ready to grow, I'm ready to be challenged and stretched in 2013.  Hopefully all those wishes we sent out will be there to protect us in the process.