Forget New Year's Day. To me, nothing says the beginning of a new year than the first day of school!  The time-honored tradition of going to school with a new outfit, a new bag and a new lunch box to find out who your teacher is and where your desk will be. I don't know how other kids did it, but attending a small Catholic school in a relatively small town, we had just one teacher and one classroom per year in elementary school and everything happened right there.

And, oh the mysteries! The tall chalkboard you couldn't reach the top of, the pencil sharpener by the door, the wall of glossy paper cutouts, and the gleaming cubicles ("cubbys") where you could keep all your papers and supplies -- so empty at the beginning of the year, so full at the end. We actually didn't bring our supplies on the first day.  We would wait for the teacher to hand us a list at the end of the day and take it home so we could rush to the store after dinner to try and find all the things -- and worrying when we couldn't.  Such holy traditions!

I know I am lucky to have had a mother who picked me up from school and took me to the store. Not everyone has that, I know, and not everyone has supplies or even a school to attend. But I didn't think about that at the time.  All I know is that I, a girl with four older brothers and sisters, accustomed to hand-me-downs for almost everything, was able to experience, once a year, the extreme pleasure of brand new pencils, crayons and glue!  Nothing beat the thrill of opening up a brand new crayon box and smelling the promise inside. A new lunch box, a new set of scissors (because they always got lost) and a new bottle of glue not yet smeared with dry residue over the top. Oh, the promise and newness of such things! Even now, decades later, the beginning of September always feels like a new year to me.