New Year’s Resolutions—

Promises, Promises For 2006

By Nancy K. Crevier

How many New Year’s Eves have you heard someone say, “After January first, I’m going on a diet.” Or cutting back on carbohydrates. Or spending less eating out. Or taking up sky-diving. Or getting a new job. So many promises made… so many promises broken.

Blame the Babylonians. They were resolute that their new year (celebrated during the spring 4,000 years ago) would start with the return of borrowed farm equipment. Since then, new year’s resolutions have become a ritual both welcomed and reviled. 

Whether the new year is celebrated in the spring or in the dark of winter, as we have since Julius Caesar picked January 1 as the start of the new year in 46 BC, the end of one year and the start of a another signals an opportunity for change and renewal. Early Christian religions considered the celebration of the new year and the promises made to be pagan rituals, but eventually incorporated the symbolism of new life and fertility into the birth of Christ. Resolutions, for a time, were seen as a sincere, spiritual promise not to be dismissed lightly.

Although generally not viewed as a binding covenant between a higher power and oneself today, the New Year’s Day resolution can act as a powerful motivator for those who are naturally goal directed. For those who are more inclined to follow a winding path through life, though, the New Year’s Day resolution can become merely a regrettable impulse that slipped from your lips. The consequence of having to own up at the end of the year to having not kept that resolution can be humiliating — even if it is only your own conscience shaming you in front of the mirror.

The buzz about The Newtown Bee office as New Year’s Day approaches is that resolutions are pretty much a moot point. Janis Gibson and Anna Kalinowski, Bee employees, admit that they have thrown in the towel so far as New Year’s resolutions are concerned, as has Susan Coney. “I’m not a great goal-setter,” Ms Gibson says, “so why frustrate myself?”

Ms Kalinowski agrees. “I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. They just don’t work out.”

Anne Kugielsky, assistant editor of Antiques and the Arts Weekly, believes that if you are going to do something, just do it. “Maybe embarrassment would keep you from breaking the resolution for longer if you announce it,” she thinks, but she doesn’t see the point in designating just one time of the year to take on something new.

Shannon Hicks, on the other hand, does make resolutions. “To enjoy singledom, friends, and familiar relationships; to remember that there are others who have less than me,” she says, will be among this year’s vows. She confesses, however, that her resolutions often “blow out the window before the end of January.”

Miss Hicks is not totally alone at The Bee in her determined effort to succeed.

“Every year I vow to get to the gym — where I already belong, but don’t go — and so far, I haven’t succeeded,” says Dottie Evans. “This fall, my doctor read the riot act, so this is the year.”

All about Newtown, it is the futility, rather than the fertility, of resolutions that is a common theme. “Not too seriously,” is how Laura and John Tolson of J&L Video approach any pledges made as the year begins.

Dave Andreotta of Land and Sea on South Main Street is not at all into making New Year’s resolutions, saying, “No, they are not for me. I try to do things throughout the year.”

If once the New Year’s resolution was tied to Christianity, it has gone the way of the wooly mammoth, thinks Newtown Congregational minister Lee Moore. He makes covenants with himself throughout the year to better himself in his personal and prayer life, but says of resolutions, “Now it’s a cultural ritual and fairly quickly forgotten; but it’s a fun thing to do, to sit around the New Year’s table and discuss where you want to be in the next year.”

 People who firmly resolve and then rapidly dissolve their word to themselves, might want to consider the more self affirming approach used by Newtown physician Diane Wenick.

 “I do make a resolution, but it’s more like a concept than a list,” says Dr Wenick, of her New Year’s resolutions. “I usually take a few minutes New Year’s Eve to think about it and it is more a ‘be a better person’ kind of thing.”

The positive outlook works for Alisa Lyons, too. Resolutions?

“I don’t make New Year’s resolutions,” she says, tongue in cheek, as she sits at her desk at The Bee, “because I’m perfect the way I am.”