New Year is such a pointless celebration and pointless celebrations annoy me. Why do we have to assign arbitrary reasons for celebrations? Why can’t we just celebrate?

I think parties and celebrations are very different things. Parties are gatherings of people in a social or quasi-social environment. Celebrations (which tend to take the form of parties, but not exclusively so) require a reason, a ‘thing’ to celebrate. Celebrate itself means “in honour of”.

I don’t see it as the one opportunity we have all year to have a party and so we should seize on it, it’s that it’s as much of a valid date to have an arbitrary celebration as any other and as a society, this is the arbitrary date that we have chosen (not that we don’t hold parties all year round and then find some kind of post hoc reason that we hold them).

To extend this idea, you could also argue that it’s human made ritual (or to be more accurate “only acknowledged as human made” as all rituals are human made there being no god and all) that we celebrate New Year, which is arguably just as important to the non-religious – otherwise what exactly are we doing with Humanist funerals and baby naming ceremonies.