New year’s day on February 1st? Now there’s an idea.

The winter solstice beckons: it's shortest day tomorrow. As I write the skies are overcast and beyond the inky-blue time. Now - at half past four - our steps are lit up with fairy lights and all outside is drained of colour. It will soon be night.

Seasonal festivities fall at the low time of the year, when daylight is spare and there are more dark hours than light. The blackness of night shuts us in. There’s a reason why we celebrate Christmas with candles, baubles, fairy lights and glittering decorations.

The lawn is sodden with rain and churned up like a ploughed field after badger-party-time. My last patio pelargonium was struggling to survive and is now recovering on the window ledge. Any more than 1 degree of frost and it would have died.

Overwintering broad beans are a bright green, erect and strong. Potted wallflowers are much better than last year’s crop and my baby spinach is still at the seedling stage. All is well with the world.

On Christmas Eve, on the day itself and through to Boxing Day the temperatures look set to be mild. I won’t even have to protect my plants against frost this yuletide.

And then it’ll be new year.

But what a pity we turn to a new calendar in the middle of winter, with the worst of the weather yet to come?

Who’s wonderful idea was it to start the year at January rather than four weeks later on February 1st?

Just imagine how much better we’d all feel: Christmas would still be the focus for December. Burns Night on 25th January could be another treat and, instead of cramming new year and Christmas into the same fortnight, we could look forward to new year’s eve on January 31st. By then our clocks would strike much later as the day wound down into dusk. And we’d embrace that extra hour of evening light. On February first, our new year’s day,  we could truly anticipate lighter nights and a relatively short spell of biting winter weather to come.

Couldn’t we just move new year’s celebrations on a month and start 2019 on February 1?

Then we could just get through January. It’s dismal and no way to celebrate a fresh start. It’s a quiet month. After Noel indulgences folk have to adjust to waking up in the dark, going to work and school in the dark and returning home in the dark. 

But February.

Now there’s something to truly look forward to.

Snowdrops, forsythia and crocus plants are getting ready to greet us. It’s slightly lighter in the mornings and I’ve even been known to get an hour’s digging in on a February evening.

This is the month when the world wakes up. Unlike January when everyone and every thing is still in hibernation. 

February is early spring. That’s when we should start our new year.

Ah but one can merely dream.

In five days time it will be Christmas day. I hope you all have a peaceful and heartwarming one. Thank you for reading my blogs during 2018 and, despite January being the worst month of the year, my very best wishes for a happy and prosperous new year.