Community rituals to bring in the New Year tend not to be very archetypal in this mythically-challenged society of ours. There's no real poetry to our celebrations- just big crowds and parades and schmaltzy announcers. It's not so much Golden Bough as gold lamé.

The city of Portland, Maine used to be an exception. Every year on New Year's Eve, the city would throw a huge festival with all the typical festivities- bands would play and dancers would dance and so forth. The highlight of the festival, though, was the Battle of the Dragons. A local puppet theater made these giant puppets on stilts, two of which were Chinese dragons. One of them represented the old year, and one the new. All of the puppets would parade down to either Monument Square or City Hall, then stage a battle with each other just before midnight.

The action in this ritual combat would be narrated by a guy on stilts, who would try to get the crowd as worked-up as possible while the dragons fought, and drummers played tribal rhythms in the background. Of course, the result of the combat was pre-ordained, but it felt like a genuine magic ritual all the same.

It was as if we, as a community, had actually bid farewell to the spirit of the old year in favor of the new, making it easier to move on and create new possibilities. Whoever created the Battle of the Dragons in the first place really understood the purpose of ritual- to bring a community together and process change in a healthy way.

The old Portland New Year's festival is long gone, and with it the dragon battle. The city surrendered that small but important part of its soul in the face of budget cuts and other problems. But the memory of that great experience lives on.