The end of the year is a reflective time for most people. But, it’s the same sun that dawns on us on the first of January. The resolutions we make at the beginning of a new year could be made on any other day. The introspective or reflective time we spend with ourselves or a close circle at the end of a year could, arguably, be more meaningful if they weren’t initiated for the social conditioning to do so. If we think about that, the new year could seem like a great commotion that interrupts the everyday flow of life, only to return to the same-same. But, the rule ‘survival of the fittest’ applies to social rituals too. There must be enough reason—even beyond the obviously commercial New Year's Eve phenomenon—for us to continue acknowledging the turn of a year the way we do.
The reason has to do with stories. More specifically, to do with sorting life stories into chapters, retelling stories through rituals, and making new ones. Across cultures, the practices of celebrating the end of a year and welcoming the new are built around our need to structure experiences through the lens of time and narrative. They help us preserve, revisit, and create stories.
Stories are built on time
Categorizing events into beginnings, middles, and ends is the fundamental structure of any story. The calendar, with its recurring cycles, serves as one of the most enduring tools for organizing our life narratives. The end of the calendar year becomes a natural pause, a reflective juncture where the finished part of our story is examined, and the rest is imagined.
In traditional New Year rituals, this connection between time and story is more evident with stories connected to the various lunar and solar calendars, agricultural cycles and celestial rhythms. These stories become repositories of cultural memory, connecting people to their environment, ancestors, and each other through shared rituals. Even our modern New Year rituals—from going out for midnight to the mandatory social media post—reflect the global culture that dominates our lives today, like the Gregorian calendar that has minted January 1st as a shared moment of reflection and renewal around the world.
Are remembrance and celebration narrative acts?
Watching how people recount their year on social media and gravitate toward spiritual or social celebrations to mark the new year, I can’t help but notice how they all take the form of making stories and continuing or, more rarely, breaking narratives. Celebrations reaffirm shared stories with rituals and practices while creating new stories that will be retold in the years to come. Fireworks, family gatherings around, traditional festive foods, or rituals of forgiveness and gratitude all serve to bind individuals together through shared experiences. The end of a year brings about an instinct to reflect on the journey so far and assess accomplishments, challenges, and growth. This introspection usually leads to making or reaffirming stories; those countless best-of-the-year stories are evidence.
Some deliberately break the narrative. A New Year celebration conceptualized by a Colombo collective of creatives wanted to break the hegemony of typical parties with borrowed elements from global pop culture; they wanted to create stories that are more closely linked to local habits and practices.
Rituals at the year’s turn also allow us to sort and categorize stories, dividing the sprawling continuum of existence into manageable segments—just like a writer would split a story into chapters. By marking the end of one chapter and the beginning of another, social rituals around the New Year help us frame experiences, offering clarity and perspective. They also lend an opportunity to reframe narratives; resolutions are stories we tell ourselves about how we will write the next chapter of our lives.
The universal and the particular
While the celebration of the new year is a universal phenomenon, many of the expressions are rooted in cultural particularities. The Gregorian calendar’s global adoption has established January 1st as the ‘New Year’ around the world. It’s now a shared temporal marker, coexisting with local traditions and rituals. Attend any New Year’s Eve party in Sri Lanka—all with elements from global culture like champagne and midnight counts—there will still be Kiribath served for breakfast (delicious local celebratory fare of rice cooked in coconut cream). After all, stories are not static but dynamic, capable of adapting to new contexts while retaining their essence.
In Sri Lanka, new year celebrations are a mix of local and global narratives; people mix stories from western pop culture with those they inherited from heritage and religion. Images L to R: 2022 cocktails at Galle Face by Charles Haynes; 2016 kiribath by Antano; 2023, banana leaves, Dijaxavier. Banana leaves are a symbol of prosperity used in retail spaces at religious festivals and new years; 2016 Puja by Goutam1962, Most religious new year rituals are often built on stories of lunar and solar calendars; 2023, milk rice, Rod Waddington. Milk rice is a celebratory fare prepared across South Asia at new years, showing how foods become repositories of cultural memory; 2021 Galle Fort old church preparing for New Year's eve, Dan Arndt.
This is why I think the social ritual of marking the end of one year and the beginning of another is a narrative act, rooted in our need to retain, create, and sort stories. What was the story so far? What comes next? It reflects our desire to make sense of time, to find meaning in the past, and to shape the future. In this interplay of stories, the new year becomes more than a date on the calendar, not because it really is any different from other days; because we decided that it is so. Because, society—considering it as a single storyteller—decided that it was the end of the chapter and the start of another.