New Year's is a difficult concept for my son. It's more than just the passage of time, it's realizing that the concept of time and the way we measure it is completely inept and inaccurate. "Time" for my son - just is. It's not something that is different in one place from what it is in another place.
Of course, he understands that clocks measure time really don't do a good job of it. More, they serve as very poor yet tangible markers of the passage of time from past to present and then to future.
The New Year comes in parcels according to the boundaries of an imaginary line; the GMT (human drawn lines which make no sense). The line isn't straight, and follows arbitrary political or geographic boundaries - also determined by people. And while my son accept this, he knows it's not true. He goes along with the collective lunacy of the world's population and chooses to celebrate New Year's at the moment that it arrives in our particular time zone - as opposed to when it really arrives which is impossible to determine on a human level. Someone would have to know when the Earth started orbiting the Sun - the exact moment. Or better yet, the exact point at which 'time' began.
As far as my son is concerned, time envelopes the world. It actually happens all at once and simultaneously. It's people who have it wrong. The sun doesn't set time. Time simply exists outside the confines or constructs of humans and their relationship with Earth.
Celebrating New Years is no different than choosing to celebrate any other human defined holiday like Christmas or Memorial Day. But with New Year's the fact that this holiday is so conspicuously celebrated at individual times around the globe is so much more pronounced and therefore, so much more ridiculous for my son.
I've tried explaining it but I don't think I will ever be able to transform subjective logic into believable science.
So, my son has adapted. He chooses to celebrate New Year's at the time that it occurs when it reaches the US. "The Ball drops at 11 o'clock"
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