New Year

New Year is the Tribe’s annual celebration of the turning year, marked by gathering at a rock, carving the next number into its surface, and giving the year a name. It grows from Ish and Em’s effort to preserve time after the collapse of the old calendar, becoming both a public record and a ritual through which each generation remembers what mattered.

Origins in Timekeeping

The practice begins with Em’s suggestion that the survivors keep track of time. Ish comes to see the idea as more than a practical calendar: time carries history, and history carries tradition. If the continuity of time disappears, he fears, something essential to civilization may be lost beyond recovery. The annual ceremony gives that concern a material form, joining the passage of the seasons to a record the community can maintain.

The first marker is cut after a complete circuit of the sun, when it has traveled south and returned to the same seasonal turning. Near San Lupo Drive, the site is a smooth rock beside a former public park, in a landscape already marked by human history: holes in the stone remain from the pounding of acorns by people who lived there before even the period later called the Old Times. At the first ceremony, Em nurses the baby in the winter sun while Ish uses his hammer and cold-chisel to cut the numeral 1. He adds a serif and a small hook to make it resemble the printed figure he remembers. They call it Year One, while Em prefers Year of the Baby, a name rooted in the family’s immediate experience rather than an abstract number.

The Annual Ceremony

The gathering follows the sun’s seasonal turning rather than a stated fixed calendar date. As the sun nears the limit of its southern course, the community prepares for its principal holiday. They watch for the evening when it sets in the same place as the previous day, or a little farther north; the following day, they understand, is the time to gather. The ceremony thus makes an observation of the natural world the signal for a social occasion.

The holiday combines elements of Old Times Christmas and New Year with customs particular to the Tribe. Other inherited celebrations persist unevenly: Thanksgiving remains a large communal dinner, while patriotic holidays such as the Fourth of July have lapsed. George observes Labor Day in his own traditional way, but no one else joins him. April Fool’s Day and Halloween survive through customs taught by parents to children. New Year, by contrast, becomes the Tribe’s defining festival, joining an inherited calendar of celebration to its own practice of recording the years.

At the end of the twenty-second year, the community gathers at the rock on a fair, warm winter day. Ish cuts 22 beneath 21, with mothers bringing even the youngest babies. Afterward, everyone old enough to speak calls out Happy New Year, preserving an expression from the Old Times within a new communal ritual. The repeated engraving makes the passage of time visible: the new mark does not replace the previous one but extends a sequence that the community can see and continue.

Naming the Years

The name attached to each year gives the number a shared human meaning. The Tribe does not settle on a name for Year 10 until the children suggest Year of the Fishing. During that year, the Bay is full of striped bass; fishing has supplied a welcome variety of food and enjoyment. Their choice shows how year-naming can preserve a communal memory that a bare numeral would not: a food source, a pastime, and the children’s own account of what made the year distinctive.

The naming also brings differences in age and memory into the ceremony. As the twenty-second year ends, younger children favor Year of the Bow and Arrow, while those somewhat older remember the year as the Year of the Journey. The oldest children fall quiet, thinking of Charlie and other deaths; Ish, too, thinks first of Joey and of the changes in his own outlook. When he asks what the year should be called, the community falls silent. The moment reveals that collective remembrance is not automatic: one year can hold sharply different experiences, and some losses resist a simple name.

Record, Memory, and Inheritance

New Year’s importance lies in the way it makes cultural continuity an activity rather than merely an idea. Ish’s earlier visit to the University Library had shown him stored knowledge as a possible resource for rebuilding civilization, but books alone could not ensure that knowledge would be read, taught, or carried forward. The yearly ceremony is smaller and more durable in its immediate form: people assemble, observe the turning season, make a mark, and pass a naming practice to the children.

That transmission matters in a society with little stored tradition and limited reading. Ish worries that children may inherit superstitions without learning how to distinguish them from harmless old customs; he also recognizes that he could make them believe almost any account of the world simply by teaching it insistently. New Year offers a more concrete inheritance: a recurring act that records change without prescribing a single explanation for it. In later years, the Tribe’s adults also meet to decide matters binding on everyone, while Ish presides as younger men increasingly speak and act. The annual gathering belongs to the same broader effort to give communal life continuity through repeatable practices, even as authority and memory pass to a new generation.