Everyone, sorry for the late notice, but we’re hosting our traditional annual online New Year’s Eve party in this journal (http://ladycatherina.livejournal.com/) again this year. Got started back when I first moved to the Bay Area and everyone I knew was scattered among various states and countries or didn’t have the cash for food for a party or gas to get there.

How this works is that somewhere around the morning of New Year’s Eve Pacific Standard Time, I will post a virtual description of a party – complete with a decorated house, food, music, drinks, and a place to share memories of 2009 and hopes and dreams for 2010.

For an idea of how this works, here’s a past year’s virtual party: http://ladycatherina.livejournal.com/300058.html

Everyone from around the world is invited to come along and participate at any time that night or the next day – write a comment there describing what you’re wearing, what you’re doing, what you’re bringing (recipes are great!) and talk with anyone else by responding to their comments along with me! In past years people have danced, played Pokemon, traded gourmet recipes, and talked philosophy and remembered loved ones, through hundreds of comments.

All are welcome, regardless of whether you’re friended to ladycatherina on LiveJournal or not…and we’re inviting Synchronized Chaos Magazine’s readers and others I know from other communities.

I view New Year’s as a philosophical/spiritual holiday as well as a fun time for a get-together…this is the truly democratic, inclusive winter or summer) holiday, as everyone, regardless of how lonely or broke or sick they are, can have hope and resolutions for the new year. It’s a time when we can choose to forgive, let go of past grudges and move forward into a future with unlimited possibilities, when old barriers can be broken and new dreams realized.

New Year’s Eve was the night in Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights when romantic antihero Heathcliff let go of years of resentment towards people who had wronged him and on whom he’d previously spent most of his time exacting revenge. Then, out of the power of love and honoring the best within himself rather than the worst, he broke through the boundaries of life and death, time and memory, money and class, and found a real spiritual connection with nature and others and his departed lover, Catherine.

So, in that spirit, let us all join in forgiving the past and embracing the future, the promise of infinite creative possibilities where all are welcome.