2015

    Happy new year!
    New years is celebrated in different ways all over the world, as you can see in Daniel's earlier post. It is normally celebrated with a fireworks show and a countdown in between December and January at midnight.
    Technically, midnight is the opposite of noon, so it is the time that the sun is on the other side of the world. A time like that doesn't seem so important, and that is why my family celebrated the 2014 new year at sunrise.
    December is the last month of the year, in which Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa are celebrated. Thus December is the most festive time of the year and creates a special feeling for celebrating new year's eve.
    Because new year officially starts on 12:00:00 PM, it gets pretty tense at that time. This is why a countdown accompanies most firework shows. There is a huge countdown on a lights display on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. There is a famous ball drop at New York.
    New years is probably the least religious holiday. Christmas is Christian in origin and every other holiday has its roots in some culture. Babylonian, Celtic, more Christian holidays, and so on. New years is based on a time at the height of winter(or summer) and celebrates every new year, or every circulation the earth makes around the sun.
    This holiday leads into the first month of the year:January. It is named after the Roman god Janus, who has two faces, one for looking forward, another for looking back. The name of this month symbolises how people look back on the old year and remember how it went while looking forward at the new year with hope.
    One thing I won't get into in this post is the tradition to think of new years resolutions and forget them overnight.
    Think about how you feel when you see the following word. Wait for it...

2014.

    That year has just passed. You must remember a lot from it.
    Every January, the Gensemer family writes a 'Dear friends' letter that we e-mail to our friends and post on Facebook. It contains what each of us has done the past year.
    This is the second word...

2015.

    Yep, that is this year. The international year of light and light-based technologies. There is a whole year ahead of us. A little less than 365.25 days, to be exact.