New Year is a great holiday because of  festive celebrations and the promise of new beginnings.   I look at it as a kind of automatic reset or refresh button for life. 

New Year is also a cool holiday because you can celebrate it multiple times each year.  Among all of the cultures, religions, calendars and countries worldwide, there are at least 26 different New Years that are celebrated and many are celebrated on different days and in different ways.

Songkran, the Thai New Year, is a New Year I like to celebrate.  It is a three-day festival that usually falls in mid April.  Songkran is also known as the water festival.  It celebrates water as a ritual of washing away negativity from the year before.  People celebrating Songkran take part in a traditional pouring of water that symbolizes washing away back luck and sins from a person’s life.  

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“Playing water” with some serious water guns in Bangkok’s Silom district.

No matter when, how, or how many times you celebrate the new year, I think we are all more than ready to put the negativity of 2020 in the rear view mirror and embrace 2021 optimistically.

Cheers!