Hot on the heels of Christmas comes New Year. It’s here before we’ve had time to shut Bethlehem’s stable door! We move from an event which occurred once in human history (though to be honest we don’t know the exact date) to an event which occurs over and over again, every time the sun completes its annual orbit of the earth. Christmas is, of course, a religious festival. New Year is a natural event elevated to a universal celebration.

I can understand why the Scots, proud Calvinists that they were, opted for Hogmanay rather than Christmas, with its popish implications - Christmas, you will note - but I have never been able to work up any enthusiasm for celebrating it myself. New Year, Hogmanay, is no more than a statistical event, the clicking on the milometer of life of another year. To celebrate it seems to me the ultimate triumph of hope over experience: perhaps next year will be better than the last one.

However, those words from Ecclesiastes rebuke me. They remind us that time, like space, is a divine creation. We are to treat the created world with respect, to act as its stewards. In the same way, we are to treat time with respect, and again we are its stewards. It has been given to us, but conditionally and temporarily. One day we shall answer for our stewardship both of the planet and of time. What did we do with them? That, for me, is the sobering element of any New Year.

I realise sobriety isn’t a word we usually associate with it. The crowds will be out in city centres, drunken revellers will plunge into the fountains in Trafalgar Square and the odd sound of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ will echo around the streets. Yet for many of us, perhaps sitting quietly at home with the radio or television, glass in hand, it is a moment for reflection. 2011 will have had some happy moments - the birth of a child or grandchild, perhaps, or a marriage, or a wonderful new friendship. It’s right at the end of a year to give thanks to God for the good things. The year will probably also have had some sad moments: the death of someone close and loved, disappointments of one kind or another, and memories of our own failures and faults. The passing of the year may be a time to hold both the happy memories and the sadder ones before ‘the God of all comfort’.

It may also be a moment to pray that as we enter another year it may be one in which we do so with Christian hope, for the ‘God of all comfort’ is also the ‘God of all hope’. Our times are in his hand, and he is good.

Canon David Winter is a former Dicoesan Adviser on Evangelism, former BBC head of religious affairs, a broadcaster and author of many books.