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Why the New Year Starts in Mid-Winter Why the New Year Starts in Mid-Winter
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Pieter Brueghel the Elder, "The Hunters in the Snow", source: Kunsthistorisches Museum
Fiction

Why the New Year Starts in Mid-Winter

Aldona Kopkiewicz
Reading
time 6 minutes
Aldona Kopkiewicz:
a Polish poet, the author of several poetry books. She also writes prose, essays and plays.

What if we got stuck in an endless February? Aldona Kopkiewicz looks at the sparrows from Hans Christian Andersen’s tale to reflect on transience, human existence in space and time, and the eternal cycles of nature.

The New Year begins on the first day of January, as we know. I must admit, however, that I’ve never wondered before why another time cycle starts on this particular date. It’s yet another year, but we tend to experience it as something radically new. The illusion of a new beginning is good for our mental health. Even though our psychic life consists of arduous and complex processes, this specific day – which encapsulates the drama of beginnings and endings, or welcomes and farewells – can be celebrated intensely, ecstatically and unequivocally. In that regard, New Year’s resembles a birthday.

There exists, however, an obvious reason why we celebrate our birthday on a particular day, whereas 1st January is set arbitrarily, at least for those of us who follow the Julian

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Aldona Kopkiewicz:
a Polish poet, the author of several poetry books. She also writes prose, essays and plays.
Translation: Joanna Mąkowska
Publish date: 26.02.2021

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Chasing the Cold Chasing the Cold
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Chasing the Cold

A Psychoanalytic Reading of “The Snow Queen”
Renata Lis
Renata Lis:
A writer and translator, whose works include “Lesbos” (a book about love and exile), and completely unique biographies of Flaubert and Bunin, for which she was nominated for awards (one of which she won). She can’t decide whether she’s a pine dreaming of being a palm, or the other way around, so she alternates her travels between Greece and Russia; she’s been as far as Kamchatka.

Where is the snow? Will it fall this winter, shrouding our cities and silencing the hubbub of the streets? The winter landscape endures most persistently in childhood fairy tales. It brings with it icy beauty, the promise of eternity, but also a sense of unrest. Let’s take a closer look at the primitive images and dreams reflected in the mirrors of many generations and the winter metaphors being challenged by the sun.

There are some dreams that leave us with a single image on waking. This image, surrounded by a strong emotional aura, accompanies us throughout the day—we keep it deep inside, safe and sound. Every now and then, we check to make sure it’s still there; that it hasn’t faded or completely disappeared. For me, Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Snow Queen, which my mother used to read to me before bed when I was young, is a dream of the same kind. Much of the plot has long since escaped me, but the image of the icy queen was etched in me forever, like a shard of the broken mirror from Andersen’s story. Because dreams and fairy tales are basically the same world—kindred sanctuaries, removed from the dominion of daytime reason, where the unconscious thrives.

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