New Year, 2012!

Hi everyone! I hope you have had a lovely Christmas, and have a great New Year!

This post is about the New Year, which I'm sure is something people are thinking a lot about at the moment! As I'm writing, it is currently New Year's Eve. I'm not a big New Year's celebrator. I don't do the whole champagne at midnight thing, although I do stay up (usually!). I use the opportunity to eat lots of chocolates and watch the special New Year's programmes that are on TV, and spend the evening with my family. I guess, although I don't do the big New Year's Eve celebrations, me and my family have our own traditions, in our own way!
I've always said, I don't think the New Year is very special, at least, not like Christmas. If I needed to work over New Year's Eve/Day, I wouldn't mind (although, if there was a day off, I would take it!!).

But I think, if there's one thing the New Year represents, it's a new start. Although I don't work on the proper yearly calendar- I work on the academic calendar, with September being my January, if that makes sense, the majority of the rest of the world works on January-December, so it just seems natural that I do too, at least in part. There are 2 main things I'm going to use this new start as an opportunity for.
The first is New Year's resolutions. Normally I hate setting myself resolutions. It comes from school, when at the start of the new school year we were told to list resolutions we want to work on for the coming school terms. But that means going through all our bad habits, our failures- I HATE looking back at my failures!!! But this year I want to look at it with a positive stance- 'What will make my life easier?', 'What would I like to improve this year?' etc. Not looking at my failures, my bad habits, but concentrate on making my life better for the forthcoming year.
That ties in with my second thing I'm going to do this New Year- The Happiness Project! I started reading the book in August (and haven't actually had time to finish it!), and thought I would start my own at the start of the next month, September, which is also the start of my uni academic year- it seemed perfect! But I was always so busy with everything I had to do when I got back to uni that I never got around to it!! I haven't had even 1 month where I have successfully managed to fulfil anything substantial for the Project. So I will start again with  this New Year.
Today's project is therefore to write a list of resolutions, and work out my January Happiness Project focus, and list of things to do towards it each day. Hopefully, I will post at the start of each month what that month's focus is, and at the end of that month how successful/unsuccessful I have been! My overall aim is self-improvement- and hopefully- Happiness because of it!!