To celebrate big-time or to celebrate as usual?  Is today the end of a decade or only the end of a year?  It is a matter of controversy, apparently, and some pundits say if you are in doubt whether the decade ends tonight or a year from now, celebrate twice.  Talk about hedging your bets…

It seems to depend on how you count.  I can’t really wrap my head around that.  No matter how I look at it, from 0 to 1 (as in from your birth to your first birthday) serves as year one.  And, since 10 years make a decade, when you are 10, you are a decade old.  When 2020 is completed, we will have ended the second decade of this century.  Period and amen and not really open to discussion.

Unless you belong to a culture which counts you as one when you are born or uses some other method of marking time.  According to Wikipedia:  East Asian age reckoning originated in China and continues in limited use there along with Tibet and Japan, but is still common in Korea. People are born at the age of one, i.e. the first year of lifetime using an ordinal number (instead of “zero” using a cardinal number,) and on Chinese New Year or New Year’s Day,  one year is added to their age. Since age is incremented at the beginning of the lunar or solar year, rather than on the anniversary of a birthday, people may be one or two years older in Asian reckoning than in the international age system.

That is way out of my reasoning ability.  I cannot wrap my head around the logic.  But it is interesting to think that some of my Asian friends are not as old as they believe themselves to be.   Or, that on those days that I feel older than my birthdays account for, I was perhaps born into the wrong part of the world.

In any case, in this household we are hoping to make next year the best of an otherwise difficult decade.  We’ll celebrate the the end of 2019 tonight, the arrival of a new year tomorrow and those ending and beginning decades a year hence.  You can’t have too many celebrations!