Happy New Year! The arrival of 2026 at midnight tomorrow will mean we have survived another year, touch and go though it may have seemed at times. Surely it’s right to celebrate—but, as America’s editors suggested many times in New Year’s editorials over the past 117 years, always in moderation. “Why men and women who, at least in public, behave decorously for 364 days a year,” wrote the editors in 1913, “should think that the night of the 365th day can be fittingly observed only by parading the streets and insulting inoffensive citizens, or by entering restaurants to share in drunken and indecent revels—that is one of the problems that must grieve and perplex the angels themselves.” 

That crew offered an option to the typical New Year’s debauch: a visit to the parish hall, where all might recite the “Te Deum” and the “Miserere” and participate in Benediction, “followed by an innocent merry-making of some sort that would keep Catholics off the streets.” 

If they sound like wet blankets, check out the year before, when the editors suggested “the custom is growing of making the night of December 31 a carnival of unrestraint and license,” and proposed a novel solution: to prevail upon the Knights of Columbus to “use their powerful influence to bring about the abolition of the New Year’s Eve abominations.” It sounds ominous.

The tone of America’s end-of-year reflections was not always so deprecatory, of course. In 1916, some impish editor had a bit of fun tracing the history of the yearly promises we make on Dec. 31: “Regarding the identity of the first person to take a New Year’s resolution, history is silent. Perhaps it was Father Adam, for at the threshold of his post-paradisaic career he must have been in a rather resolution-making mood.” And maybe it wasn’t really our fault that we couldn’t keep our resolutions; they were made in the dead of midwinter, after all:

In the early Middle Ages, when the twenty-fifth of March, the Feast of Our Lady’s Annunciation, was New Year’s Day and the festival was emphatically religious in its character, it was doubtless easier than it is today to take and even to keep heroic resolutions. The blithe and merry springtime, too, when hopes are high and the earth is fair, seems a more propitious season for beginning all over again than is our dour and chilling winter.

It was, you see, the fault of the weather. “Wiser, no doubt,” wrote the editors, “is the man who makes no new resolutions at all each year, but merely dusts off and furbishes up the old. Indeed, he generally discovers that the noble purposes he conceived at the beginning of former Januaries are still as good as new, for they have been little used.”

In 1943, shortages of liquor and labor in the service industry meant New Year’s celebrations would be muted even if American men weren’t dying overseas in World War II. It was a good moment, the editors mused, to return to the holiday as a family affair:

It was a sacred moment when the windows were thrown open to let the first cold, clear breath of the New Year mingle with the love-warm breath of the old. It was a family moment when glasses were raised to twinkling eyes, and a prayer was said and a song was sung. It was too short a moment, too sacred a moment, too intimate a moment to be shared with any but the family. 

If some were to take the revels elsewhere, they wrote, they might “spare a kindly thought, too, for those who minister to our pleasures on New Year’s Eve, the waiters and waitresses, the entertainers, thé dancers, the check girls, for the bus drivers and cab drivers. They, too, have homes and families.”

In 2020, we all encountered an annus horribilis with the Covid-19 epidemic. America editor Zac Davis didn’t mince words in a December valediction: “O God, let 2020 go to hell.” The trauma of that year would never go away, Davis wrote, until we did “the hard work of lamenting and raging.” That could take many forms: “Punch your pillow, scream at the passing train, light your bonfires—these are appropriate methods of prayer at the end of a year like this.”

But even in the hardest of times, the editors often noted, a new year also brought new life—and new hope. That was certainly the case at the end of 2004, when the editors wrote that “even in the best cases, the realization of earthly hopes is temporal and therefore passing. But along with their secular hopes, Christians look toward 2005, as they look toward every new year, with a divine hope—Hope with a capital H, so to speak”: 

This hope, itself a gift of grace, is not small and self-centered. It is hope, as the Second Vatican Council put it, for the time when the whole world, which is intimately bound up with man and reaches its perfection through him, will along with the human race be perfectly restored in Christ (“Dogmatic Constitution on the Church,” No. 48). In the spirit of this faith, Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke for all Christians when he said, “Our lives are invincible because our hope is certain.”

In the final issue of 1999, editor in chief Thomas J. Reese, S.J., offered his reflections in what he called “the last issue of the millennium.” He was wrong—the millennium ended a year later, on Dec. 31, 2000, but everyone makes that mistake—but gave the reader powerful words to ponder. 

His three counsels for that New Year’s Eve? First, celebrate and have fun. Second, acknowledge your mistakes of the past year (or century, or millennium), repent of them and ask forgiveness. And third, look to the future and ask some questions: “How do we preach the Gospel and celebrate Christ in a way that makes sense to 21st-century men and women? How do we foster the justice and peace of God’s kingdom? Will we learn to live in peace with justice, or will we take our conflicts to the stars?” And further, what will we bequeath to our children? “Will future generations bless us for establishing the foundations of prosperity and peace, or will they curse our selfishness and greed for causing environmental disasters and a new tribalism?”

“As Christians we are called to prepare the way of the Lord,” Father Reese wrote, “but as sinners we place stumbling blocks in the way of God’s kingdom. One way or the other, Christ will come.”

•••

Our poetry selection for this week is “David,” by Troy Reeves. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.