NEW YEAR: We like celebrating the new year.

We like having time set aside to re-evaluate what we’re doing with our life. It’s a necessary step when you’re making it up you go.

However, as the detractors remind us, New Year’s Day is just a date on the calendar; 2021, just a number. As excited as everyone is to shed 2020, the change is largely symbolic. Today doesn’t look any different than Dec. 31.

But we are on a path toward better things.

With vaccines just starting to make their way into the public, we’re starting to feel something we haven’t felt much in 2020: hope for sunnier days ahead.

It makes sense that people believe this new year’s celebration is more meaningful than in years past. We’re starting to free ourselves of the negative vortex we’ve all been sucked into in 2020.

Saying good riddance to 2020 is a good first step toward accepting our obstacles with a new mindset in 2021. We can all learn to react better when faced with new obstacles. That’s an important lesson we should all take from 2020.

We’re turning a corner — for the better, we believe — and all we have to do is round it carefully so we don’t smack the brick wall on our way around.

For us, we’re prepared to hibernate for a few months as vaccines are distributed. Staying home keeps us out of the Bradford winter weather, anyway.

RESOLUTIONS: It’s a tradition going back thousands of years that people vow to be better in the new year.

But the first recorded use of the phrase “New Year resolution” did not appear until the 19th century, according to The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

An article on almanac.com called “How Did the Tradition of New Year’s Resolutions Start?” attributes the phrase to a Boston newspaper article from 1813, which states:

“And yet, I believe there are multitude of people, accustomed to receive injunctions of new year resolutions, who will sin all the month of December, with a serious determination of beginning the new year with new resolutions and new behaviour, and with the full belief that they shall thus expiate and wipe away all their former faults.”