NEW YEAR

Motif: Angel surrounded by snow flakes and stars We all know what Christmas means: a collective joy of the family table, the window glass membrane that separates our time from everybody’s history, readiness to play oxen and donkeys to each other and use our breath to warm up creatures precious to us, humble clarity that we recognize as real wealth in the gold of the straw under the newborn child... The Christmas angels warn us that it is gloria in excelsis, “Glory be to God on high” and what is befitting for the earth then is modesty and peace. It would be hard not to notice that New Year is not only something entirely different but, moreover, something quite opposite. Personal time actually desires to blend with the general history, the table is sought outside the home and is shared by many, wealth glows with the sparkling brightness of silver and gold, from the real one to the surrogate... New Year is loud and multicoloured, in full swing and racing, a geyser of light for naive eyes. It is the time of the last acceleration; it is the exorcism of transience. We mercilessly rejoice in the flowing out of the old year, as if we were casting aside a domestic animal that had served us to exhaustion. Because afterwards arrive the Emperor’s new clothes, something young, new, fresh, open to every expected good thing. Indeed, regardless of the fact that in this paroxysm of transience con brio there is something irrational, some voluntary blindness and some dancing challenge for man’s fate - condition humaine, New Year is the feast of having confidence in chance. Everything starts from the beginning. Under the snow-covered moss the Christmas rose starts pushing through the earth. In the silence of the day fallen asleep after the sleepless night one can hear the bird’s little legs touching the branch. Or some person’s foot trundling a can. Everything is open. Everything can happen. Everything can be amended. As if with the New Year all of us become new, as if we could be children again. And children, naturally, join holidays; they would like holidays to be every day, so they engage angels even before Christmas for the time all through the last candle of the Candlemas Day. And angels, with heavenly permission, benevolently scatter real little stars so that there should be fewer surrogates on earth. New Year, even when shifted in time, is the holiday of the whole globe. Probably because each and every life resists transience and each of them wants to be renewed. Croatian Post, too, employed an angel this year that, portrayed by a child’s hand, with the cooperation of the hand of the artist Sanja Rešček, flourishes little stars and scatters new-year promises all around. Help him to fulfil them. Željka Čorak