I’ve often thought we, as people, have gotten it all wrong. We celebrate the dawn of a new year in winter, when it’s uncomfortably cold outside and everyone is still weighed down and tuckered out from the ‘old’ year, having eaten too many sugar cookies, assembled too many astonishingly complex playthings, and amassed too much carryover debt.

It would make more sense if the year changed over in autumn, when the humidity of summer is first sliced by the approach of winter, adding to the air a certain crispness that mimics the flesh of firm apples or newly laundered bed linens and the trees all get new hairstyles. Children traditionally go back to school during this time of year, wearing new clothes and carrying brand new school supplies. Truly, this is a time of new beginnings and avowed determination to do things differently. Never-before-sharpened pencils seem like a far better party favor for a new year than paper tiaras and noisemakers, now that I really think about it.

Even Mother Nature agrees with me, or maybe it’s the other way around. Births, or rebirths as the case may be, should be celebrated in grand style. The homes of newly welcomed babies are often marked with balloons or banners extending from the nursery to the front lawn for all to see. For the arrival of a seven pounds, six ounce grandson we can justify renting a gigantic inflatable stork but in contrast we accessorize the renewal of time with leftover Christmas lights and disposable hats. We serve the leftover snacks from earlier holidays. We congregate, faces turned skyward through fusillade spectacles painting the nighttime in sparkle and fizz. We take in the impressive chemistry that sends ignited canisters spiraling up-up-and-away to become purple and gold and blue and red chrysanthemums. We aren’t picky, oohing and ahhing at Roman candles and honorary supernovas alike. We twirl hissing sparklers in our hands like the majorettes we once were or wanted to be and console screaming children who don’t like thunder. When it ends, as all things are wont to do, and our sense of cold is renewed, we head back to more hospitable conditions; leaving spent sparkler stems and shredded paper strewn about for someone else to clear away.

Our grandiose aspirations for the newborn twelve months may not be enough to garner an invitation for the next turn-of-the-year.

It is not surprising that the earth does not seem satisfied with January and therefore throws itself a welcoming parade in the spring. The trees that were sticks and ugly angles during the ball dropping celebration in Times Square are now outfitted in the greatest of finery. Tulips shoot up to the surface in deceptively empty soil and nod their heads in agreement–So glad that cold nonsense is over, yes.–while the hollow-stemmed daffodils and paperwhites wave back and forth across the way to one another, all ruffled bonnets, teacups, perfume, and megaphones.

These are not austere days by any means. From Capitol Hill to Kyoto, right down Peachtree and beyond, the landscape takes on the unmistakable pink-and-white collar of cherry trees in bloom, wearing it with all the dignity of a liturgical chasuble. The streets and sidewalks become dotted with tiny blossoms, pulled by the wind from their branches and scattered as confetti, the obligatory element of any good parade.

Even the dogwoods, cornus florida if keeping score, gain stature when festooned with their four-point flowers. Puny, empty deciduous dwarf trees—shrubs, really—set in the landscape architecture for sentimental reasons found in, albeit unsubstantiated, Biblical lore. Their lease is renewed in the springtime, securing another season in suburban communities and public parks.

I understand the basis for our calendar observances; the logic mitigating a need to campaign for societal revision of such a grievous error as celebrating the beginning of the year at the wrong time. I won’t be picketing on December 31st or filing nonprofit paperwork for the Committee to Fix New Year’s, but all the lunar tables and papal edicts supported by mathematical rationale and Gregorian authority can’t eschew the fact that the year is really new now in a way that I just didn’t see in January…and I did look. Really.