It's a new year

I claimed in a recent blog that I could probably remember most of the Christmases in my life. I love Christmas as a time to get together and celebrate mid winter. I find New Year just as meaningful now. It' s a time to review what's gone, leave behind what you don't want to carry with you, and a chance to look forward to the adventures and changes to come. Looking back over the years, and all the New Year's Eves I can recall I would struggle to choose a favourite. As children my sister and I would leave a stocking at the end of the bed. In the morning there would be some sweets and an orange in it. What a lovely tradition to raise the spirits after all the excitement of Christmas seemed to be over.Family parties before my father left to work in Nigeria were another highlight.He made ham and pea soup in a pressure cooker and created multi layered club sandwiches, cut like a cake. I heard She Moves Through the Fair sung for the first time by Angela Mangan, not much older than me. When my parents lived in Sarawak I had a couple of strange equatorial New Year Eves.For one I was so ill with a tropical fever that I watched sunrise to sunset flash past my bedroom window in a matter of minutes. After I left school I had difficult few months, and was whisked off to Devon by an older and very kind friend. We went to stay at an amazing manor house outside Barnstaple with a well known band he was doing some work for. Wives,parents, children and friends made it an unforgettable house party, and at midnight on New Years Eve we rang the bells of the private chapel in the grounds. Another year,when my family were back in England I got a New Years Eve transatlantic phone call from a boyfriend in San Francisco telling me he was coming home because he missed me so much. He didn't materialise, but my dad did make me my first Rusty Nail. I didn't know alcohol could be so delicious!I saw my first New Years Eve fireworks in Casablanca, and heard the ships blow their foghorns in the port there at midnight. I saw Christmas tree bonfires in Rotterdam. What a practical way to celebrate a New Year. Once I had my own children, there were New Year Eves with young babies, coughs and colds, and occasionally friends and their offspring gathered round for impromptu parties when none of us could afford or secure babysitters. We always stay up until midnight, and first footing is part of the tradition most years. A dark haired person sent to stand outside in the cold at five to twelve, with a lump of bread, a piece of coal and a coin.It seems important to be with the people you want to be with, whether family, friends or very occasionally one significant other, and in a place that feels like home, my own or someone else's . Pubs, clubs and hotels don't work for me, and I don't like kissing strangers !My father died in the early hours of New Years Day 2010 and some of the family spent New Years Eve at the nursing home with him. My mother was there with him to the end. It was a blue moon, the second full moon in a calendar month that year, and I thought it was a very good time for him to leave us. The following year I spent New Years Eve watching TV with my mum, quiet and cosy.Nowadays its Jools Holland and his Hootenany (recorded in September I am told!) rather than Andy Stewart's White Heather Club.Last year I spent it in a remote country cottage with someone who I thought was going to be significant in 2012, but like the Californian boyfriend, it didn't materialise. This year I was with good friends and my daughter and her partner. It was lovely. My youngest son had a gig, and I remembered the frustration of his father having a New Years Eve gig when he was a baby and we were left home alone.That's the beauty of looking back. Every year starts with hopes, resolutions and expectations, and then life intervenes, and I go through the whole process again 12 months later.Happy New Year!