Setting Fire to New Year's Eve

About 4 years ago, I stopped making New Year's resolutions. My husband and I own a bar and we wanted to bring in our own new years traditions for our business  - resolutions just really weren't doing it for us. They don't really seem to do it for most people.

So we just started setting stuff on fire.

And we asked other people to set stuff on fire with us.  

Every New Year's Eve, we would hand out paper and pens and ask people to write down the worst parts of their year...

cancer.

divorce.

self loathing.

getting fired.
financial troubles.

getting laid off.

heartbreak.

loss.

Whatever was terrible about the year, we wrote it down. We folded up all of our terrible things and we threw them in a metal bucket. We doused the paper in charcoal fluid and at 11:45 pm we set it all on fire and watched it burn.

We burned it before midnight because we were not going to take any of that into the next year. We couldn't, because we burned it. It didn't exist anymore.

At midnight, we celebrated all of the possibilities that the new year was going to bring to us.

And when spring came in the new year, we took the ashes of the previous year's heartache and we mixed them in with the dirt of our wildflower garden so that something beautiful could come from the things that seemed to want to break us before.

Happy New Year.

I know you will do amazing things with it.