Why I Won’t Wish You a “Happy New Year” and Other Unlikely Thoughts on the Holiday
by Kimberly Phinney
Why I Won’t Wish You a “Happy New Year”
and Other Unlikely Thoughts on the Holiday
by Kimberly Phinney
1.
The new year is upon us, and everywhere I look, slogans are telling me to finish the year “strong” or to start the new year “right.” And then there are some who—and thank God for them—are reminding our weary souls that we can end this year or start the new year “soft,” if we need to. I must say, I really appreciate that sentiment with the year we’ve had!
But, as I contemplate the many messages we are receiving now, as we do every year, I feel myself wanting to dig deeper and beyond these cultural sentiments.
Please hear me: There is nothing wrong with celebrating the close of one year and the heralding of the next. We must be a forward-looking people for many reasons. And I love a dose of optimism as much as the next person!
However, I must say, as I’ve gotten older and learned to suffer for the past several years with my chronic illness, I hold the world differently. I am learning many things I once accepted at face value—because it was some cultural zeitgeist or protected tradition—I am now turning over like an old rock in the garden to reexamine the life that has gone unseen beneath it.
Most often, my thought processes these days start with a “What if?” Then I follow the breadcrumbs to see where they lead, and when I come up for air—after many turns and hard inner work—I often find myself with countercultural thoughts, or at the very least, ones that are different from what I believed was wholly true just five years ago. And what has remained true in all this digging, like my faith and what and who I love most, has simply grown deeper, wider, and more nuanced, as I learn to hold more meaning and mystery in my hands.
2.
So, back to the New Year! What I came here to say to you is that I don’t wish you a “Happy New Year.”
I hope that doesn’t sound too harsh, but I think the saying “Happy New Year” and its variations fall short of our lived experiences. Simply wishing you and me or anyone else I love a “Happy New Year” would be doing them a disservice. What I want the very most for you and me is something very different: I actually wish you a very “Holy Old Year”!
Let me explain.
I wish you a “Holy Old Year!” Doesn’t that just ring in your ears? It really should be set to a nice tune. In fact, I can almost hear Bing Crosby crooning for us now.
But in all seriousness, I think we can agree that our culture is just slightly obsessed with the “new.” We celebrate the new, the strong, the best, the most cutting-edge… the biggest, the brightest, the richest… The list goes on and on. But in all this chest-beating and forward-looking—packed with resolutions, diet plans, busy calendars, new goals, side hustles, girl bosses, and more—we forget to remember. We forget to savor. We forget to “remember the wonders of old” (Psalm 77:11).
It’s so easy to forget, isn’t it? It’s so easy to peer eagerly into the future for more and better and stronger and newer. When in reality, we are actually getting older, sometimes lonelier, and often less satisfied with our lives.
If we just look at the word “happy,” we know it is circumstantial. Happiness is fickle, fading, and hard to come by for many. The harder we run after it, the further out into the future it moves—like Jay Gatsby, the green light, and all it represented.
We think so many things in our ceaseless reaching:
“This is the year I will be happy! I’ll be at my new job!”
“I’ll have that raise I’ve been waiting for! And we will finally settle into our new house!”
“The kids will finally be out of the house! And I can get my sanity back!”
“I’ll finally lose the twenty pounds that have been making me feel terrible about myself!”
“He will finally propose to me! Then my life will finally start!”
“We’ll finally get pregnant this year. I just know it!”
“She’ll finally love me for exactly who I am!”
“The chemo will finally work this year, and then everything will be okay!”
“He will finally stop drinking, and we can be a family again!”
Oh, how I wish every one of those statements were true for us all! But what happens if they aren’t? What happens if they don’t come true in 2025—or any year for that matter? Then what happens to our happiness? And what happens to us?
Or, what happens if they do come true? But what you thought would bring you happiness only leads to more stress or a future demise you could have never predicted. The job you always wanted takes you away from your family. The house you stretched for is no longer affordable and bankrupts you. The proposal you so desperately wanted wasn’t who God had in store for you. What then?
3.
I only ask these questions because I have made some huge mistakes in my journey that have taught me many lessons I am still trying to work through.
So, since we are on the topic, here’s one of my biggest mistakes: Every new year, I beg God for healing, and then I proceed to tie up all my hope and happiness in that healing. I deeply believed 2022 would be the year, after almost dying from sepsis and Stage 4 Endometriosis in 2021 and three radical surgeries. It wasn’t. Then, I believed it would be 2023. It wasn’t a “Happy New Year” either. It brought deep, dark months of job loss, friendship loss, community loss, bedridden days, and finally, another surgery to walk again. I was wrong again.
As I approached 2024, I was positive this would be our year! “Finally,” I thought, “2024 is our year of healing and health! I can finally reenter the world and be happy again after a fourth surgery! I can finally heal from what was done to me!” But that wasn’t the case either. After more illnesses, setbacks, hospitalizations, and diagnoses, I am now entering 2025 with a limp, and I have realized I can’t keep waiting for “happy” and “healthy” to be my prerequisites for truly living. I must live in the “here and now” however it looks—be it December 27, 2024, or January 1, 2025. I will continue to hope for health and healing. We will continue to pray for it! But it cannot be what I live for. It cannot be what I require to find purpose and joy in my life.
I must be different.
4.
Perhaps the way forward is actually the way backward. Maybe the way we learn to move forward in our lives and accept them for what they are—and cherish them for what they are—is that we are able to look back and take account of what God has done in and through our difficulties, disappointments, and losses.
I wonder if it does more good for our souls to focus on the holiness of the old years—the ones God just walked us through—than to worship the happy and sparkly anticipation of the new year.
If I look at my life and measure it against popular culture and the images and messages that are shared and celebrated widely, I have very little to cling to when I wake in the middle of the night in debilitating pain or miss another one of my daughter’s events. If I look to the glitz and glamour of the “good life” or the aesthetic charisma of digital platforms, I will become engulfed by dissatisfaction, as I assess my life and what it looks like now against the edited lives of the masses on Instagram, or TikTok, or television.
But, if I dig deep into the God of the Bible, our Man of Sorrows, the baby in the manger, and the work of the Cross, I see that life isn’t about a “Happy New Year.” It’s about a holy one—the years of old and the years to come.
If we don’t slow down enough to be people who remember, as Frederick Buechner writes about in his book A Room Called Remember, then we will miss the divine beauty that has carried us to this very moment in time. We must look over our shoulders and recount all God has done, even when life wasn’t shiny or perfect or easy.
Buechner writes this in his titular essay:
“To remember my life is to remember countless times when I might have given up, gone under, when humanely speaking I might have gotten lost beyond the power of any to find me. But I didn’t. I have not given up. And each of you, with all the memories you have and the tales you could tell, you also have not given up. You also are survivors and are here. And what does that tell us, our surviving? It tells us that weak as we are, a strength beyond our strength has pulled us through at least this far, at least to this day. Foolish as we are, a wisdom beyond our wisdom has flickered up just often enough to light us if not to the right path through the forest, at least to a path that leads forward, that is bearable. Faint of heart as we are, a love beyond our power to love has kept our hearts alive.”
This strength beyond our strength, and wisdom beyond our wisdom, and love beyond our love—year after year—is our Father God, moving and providing on our behalf.
5.
This holy act of remembering what was and has been is how we move forward to embrace any kind of year the new year might be: happy or sad, wonderful or dreadful, full of blessings or loss—or all of it altogether, as it so often is.
Taking down a record of what God has done for us, despite all odds, in the years of old is our best way to welcome the new year. Let those moments—those acts of recollection—be like a shining Ebenezer in your hand like it was for Samuel in the Bible (see 1 Samuel 7). Instead of writing a list of New Year’s resolutions, write a list of things God has done with this holy old year and set it up like an Ebenezer stone, saying, “Thus far the Lord has helped us” (1 Samuel 7:12). Then, reach out for it. Cling to it. And never let it go.
Stone of Ebenezer by Ottmar Elliger
It is in our remembering that we can face whatever the new year brings—happy or not.
So, please don’t be offended if I don’t wish you a “Happy New Year”—because I wish you so much more. I wish you a year steeped in holy remembering, rooted in the eternal joy of God’s love and providence, and the gifts of the human souls around you, all of which will live on forever—unlike the houses and jobs and success… or a certain set of circumstances that ceaselessly work to allure us.
There is something richer and purer than the world’s happiness.
There is something deeper and more sustaining than New Year’s resolutions.
And I hope you find that something shining like an eternal light in the darkness—in all your years that have been and will be.
So, Holy Old Year to you, my friend!
You belong here,
me
KIMBERLY PHINNEY
Kimberly Phinney is a writer, professor, and counselor. She’s been published in Christianity Today, Ekstasis, Fathom, Humana Obscura, Calla Press, and more. She is founder of www.TheWayBack2Ourselves.com. Her poem “Exalted Ground” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2024 with The Dewdrop. Her poem “An Ode to Hard Dark Nights” won the Audience Choice Award in the Bright Wings Poetry Contest with Ekstasis and Makers and Mystics in 2024. And her small collection of poetry from Of Wings and Dirt won runner up in Fathom Magazine’s Poetry Contest in 2023.
A doctoral candidate in community care and counseling, Kimberly holds an M.Ed. in English and studied at Goddard’s Creative Writing MFA program. She was featured on Good Morning America for a national award and teaching through critical illness. Her poetry collection, Of Wings and Dirt, was a bestseller on the Amazon Charts in 2024 for several months. Her second book of poetry, Exalted Ground: Poems of Praise and Lament for the Living, will be published in 2025.