For me, New Year’s Day is becoming a way of life. A few years ago, what little enthusiasm I had to celebrate a different holiday each month completely dissolved, like tattered old crepe paper streamers. I stopped celebrating all but one—New Year’s Day. I relish this holiday because it helps me to continually look forward, embrace how I’ve changed, and of course, enjoy food, drink and dancing with friends and family. I can relax and enjoy New Year’s Day, because I’m not expected to buy armfuls of gifts [1] or to wear a particular color [2] all day.

This year, though, I’m falling back into the monthly routine. In my own version of Groundhog Day [3], I can’t stop welcoming the New Year in 2006: champagne in January, dragon floats in February [4], and for the first time ever, jumping over open flames in March, with spring just one week away.

On Tuesday, I joined friends at a Berkeley, California street fair for Chaharshanbeh Soori, a party held the week leading up to Norooz, or Persian New Year, on March 20. We lined up on Durant Avenue near the city’s Persian Center, as hundreds do every year [5], for our turn to leap over three small fires while saying the cleansing phrase, “Zardi e man az toh, Sorkhi e toh az man”—“My yellowness onto you, your redness onto me.” We exchanged colors with the flames, symbolically giving away our dullness, poor health, bad luck and worries from the past year, and welcoming brightness, vigor, and good fortune for the new one. Fire-leapers were young, old, parents holding babies, and one woman whose flared-leg pants were stylish, if seemingly hazardous. (Medical professionals nearby were happily not called to duty.)

The Persian fire-jumping tradition has roots in ancient Zoroastrian culture, and predates Islam in Iran; the holiday is celebrated today by people of various ethnicities and religions. Bonfires are traditionally set in the streets or in families’ backyards (the latter being less common in the U.S., given unwitting neighbors’ tendency to call fire trucks). Holiday fare includes Ash-e Resteh-e Nazri, a noodle soup, symbolizing the untangling of new paths the New Year might take, and Ajeel-e Moshgel Goshah, the "unraveler of difficulties," made with seven dried fruits and various nuts.

Next year, if it’s not raining, I hope to leap over the Chaharshanbeh Soori bonfires on Ocean Beach, on San Francisco’s Pacific side. Until then, I’ve got nine more months of New Years to go. After all, if a resolution is worth making, I hope I’m tending to it year-round.

Photo: Persian Center, Berkeley, CA [6]