Spring has springed.

Spring: a time of new beginnings, of rebirth... a time when the sun is directly overhead at locations successively further north of the equator! It's funny how depending on your perspective the year "starts" at different times.

The usual beginning and end to the year is the calendar year, culminating with a countdown at a big party (are we supposed to be celebrating the end of the year, or the beginning of the year?), and bringing with it many changes. For one, everyone needs to get a new calendar (except school children and teachers... which I'll get to in a minute). Also, everyone tends to make new year's resolutions where they use this arbitrary new beginning to force themselves to change some behaviour that they don't like.

Another calendar new year is the lunar new year (in all it's incarnations), and for my family this means chinese new year. Being a lunar new year, the exact date in terms of the solar calendar fluxuates, but it usually falls in late January or early February. There are many traditions associated with chinese new year, but the ones that we usually follow are limited to cleaning the house before the new year, giving red envelopes and eating a meal with family (or talking with them on the phone if they are too far away).

When i was a kid, the only year that had much effect on me was the school year, so my year began in September and ended in June (I am still swayed by this calendar as Susanna is a teacher). What about the months in between? They just weren't on the calendar. As a kid, this new year always brought new clothes, new books, papers and pens, new classes, new teachers, sometimes a new school, and sometimes new friends. This is probably the new year that brought with it the most dramatic and immediate changes.

Spring, though, to me seems to be the real new year. There is something about the rapidly increasing number of daylight hours that seems to make a dramatic difference. Remebering how to differentiate sinusoidal functions... the vernal equinox is the day where the increase in daylight hours from day to day... so this is the time of year where things are changing the fastest (I suppose they are changing equally quickly at the autumnal equinox, but in the opposite way). The increased light changes people's moods (whether it's more vitamin D that effects a change or not, I don't know), changes the activities people do (they have more time to do things during the "day"), and starts changing the temperature. I'm no pagan, but I think the beginning of spring is the real new year. I'm going to start making resolutions, cleaning house and getting new stationery every spring

-KDH

p.s. A colleague of mine who is relatively new to Canada told me that it shouldn't be so cold anymore... spring is here, winter is over. I told him that in Canada, winter doesn't end when spring begins.