Michele Walker, Orlando journal editor (ROBERTO GONZALEZ)
“For final 12 months’s phrases belong to final 12 months’s language and subsequent 12 months’s phrases await one other voice.” T.S. Eliot
I like this quote by T.S. Eliot, which seems forward to the inevitable change and development the New Yr will deliver to our lives, with the hope that what comes into our lives might be definitely worth the wait.
There’s a tag to this T.S. Eliot quote, “And to make an finish is to make a starting.” We hardly ever view the writer of “The Waste Land” as an optimist, however maybe it’s the optimist in me that views his now-famous New Yr’s quote as considered one of hope.
After I was rising up in Orlando, New Yr’s Day dinner was an occasion that set the tone for your entire 12 months. I compelled myself to eat black-eyed peas, in any other case referred to as Hoppin’ John, each single January first of my childhood. Mother cooked it with pork, one other good luck meals. She at all times did her finest to make sure the 12 months obtained off to a promising begin.
One 12 months I used to be sick, and despite the fact that I couldn’t maintain down water, I nonetheless managed to squeeze some nutrient paste from a single, dreaded black-eyed pea. My total 12 months was on the road.
After shifting across the nation as an grownup, I found southerners weren’t the one ones that used meals for luck. Many Asian cultures feast on fish across the New Yr, and in Europe, folks eat carp, herring, and cod, one thing you’ll discover in states like Minnesota and Wisconsin, the house of the lutefisk. In Spain, Cuba, and Mexico, they eat twelve grapes at midnight as rapidly as attainable to represent good luck for the approaching twelve months. In Greece, they throw a complete pomegranate throughout the ground, releasing a sea of seeds that symbolize fertility, life, and abundance; it appears like a multitude.
Round twenty years in the past, I lived subsequent door to a household from Puerto Rico. I particularly love their custom of feasting on pork on New Yr’s Day and throwing a bucket of water out their home windows to drive away evil spirits. You possibly can’t beat the symbolism of a great bucket throw.
Talking of traditions, try Susan Jenk’s story “A Aim is Only a Want,” an interesting examine resolutions, why we make them, why we want them, and suggestions for setting and reaching your objectives in 2023.
Orlando journal’s January 2023 version options the Orlando Residence Design Awards, the place we acknowledge the highest companies in Central Florida’s house design trade. We launched the Orlando Residence Design Awards in 2021, and it’s develop into a valued custom utilized by lots of our readers. This 12 months we have now expanded our awards, and you’ve got voted in your favourite companies in over 50 classes.
Irrespective of the place you come from, traditions are important to our lives. They create consolation, a way of belonging, and security and join our previous to our future. Rituals and traditions present us with a way of identification.
Right here’s to discovering your voice in 2023 and hoping that New Yr’s Day is the primary web page in a clean ebook the place you possibly can write your subsequent unforgettable story.
T. Michele Walker
michele.walker@orlandomagazine.com
