Not quite ready for a new year

After weeks and months of gloom, compounded by tallies of the past year's presidential carnage and premonitions of its likely continuation, it's almost confusing to find myself believing, feeling, that something new is likely, at least possible in 2018, that 2017's harms might be undone, even redeemed. Is it just the lengthening days, which my body senses? Is it the peer pressure, from cultures around the world acting out a new start? (Rituals and sacred time!) Or little baby Jesus, just a few days old... a few more days before the flight to Egypt.