Next?

Greetings fellow turkey tasters, stuffing scoffers, cranberry consumers. Let us all bid a hurried farewell to 2009. Whether it ends with a bang or a whimper it ends nevertheless and we all look forward to the next decade. To say the year ended inauspiciously would be an understatement worthy of someone from my fair isles. Yes we are still in the dead zone between Christmas and New Year, Kwanzaa suspended and Hanukkah held looking to a decade we hope will be more Gator, and less Lemon-ade.

So what now? New ideas, better plans, less loans? The possibilities are nothing like endless, but with all of this frugality, fear and pink slip petrification comes a sense of that special magic that every new year brings, that it will be different.

In the regions around Azerbaijan and Iran the new year festival of Novruz comes in the spring time and in commemoration of that time children build fires and jump over them. They trust that the old bad things will be burned away as they leap over the tongal and a new year will begin with them free and clear. For many despite foreclosures and credit crunches there arises in the breast of man a sense that things can change and will be better, and why not! 

So whatever 2009 did to you, take five minutes to linger in the luxury or melancholy of it and then turn your head to 2010 and shout out, Next!