Heather du Plessis-Allan: 'Tis the season to be thankful

Be careful what you wish for: Brexit supporters outside the Houses of Parliament in London. Photo / AP

Congratulations. You have survived what some are calling The Worst Year Ever.

In fact, before getting too optimistic, it'd pay to count your fingers, toes and teeth, just in case 2016 and its sickle grabbed one last piece of you on the way out.

Last year felt like the year of death, like the world was walking down a sniper's alley that took 12 months to clear.

The year claimed the people we thought would never die: David Bowie because he was never fully human, Muhammad Ali because he was the greatest, Harper Lee because you didn't know she was still alive. Alan Rickman. Prince. Leonard Cohen. Ray Columbus. There's more. Gene Wilder. Bunny Walters, George Michael. The list goes on even further. If the pub quiz question is "When did [famous person] die?", the answer is probably 2016.

We didn't just lose well-known faces to the last 12 months. The young among us lost a bit of their innocence. By the end of the year, the world seemed a less safe place. The bombs in the Brussels airport, the truck that mowed down the Bastille Day crowd in Nice, the truck that did the same at the Berlin Christmas markets, the shooting of young people in a nightclub in Florida.

Then, we got Brexit and Donald Trump and Pokemon Go.

So, you have a good excuse for last night's excesses. Unless you lived through Hitler's 1943, the Black Plague of 1348 or the year Taupo's eruption sent an ash cloud all the way to China, 2016 was probably the worst year in your lifetime.

But, ultimately, it wasn't the violence and deaths and surprise election outcomes that made the past 12 months the worst. It was the giant backwards step we willingly took.

The United States started the year with the first black president and ended with the electoral college approving the first cartoon president.

After decades of globalisation and air travel bringing us closer together, crowds cheered when Donald Trump threatened to build a wall, and the world sat on its hands while Hungary's government actually did build a wall.

In what's expected to be declared the hottest year on record, the Americans elected a President promising to bring back coal, and Kiwirail decided to replace electric trains with diesel locomotives on the Main Trunk Line.

Every now and again, academics spot what they call watershed years. Those are the years that impact disproportionately on the world for decades to come. The last year like that was 1979. In that year, free market proponent Margaret Thatcher became Britain's Prime Minister, an Islamic Revolution gripped Iran and China began to open up to the world. Decades later, the Western world is run by free market policies, Islam and its followers are in the news, and China is in our kids' toy boxes.

It's possible we'll one day look back at 2016 as a watershed year. We've already seen signs the world is starting to change. The Brexit vote to put up policy walls around Britain, a failed coup in Turkey, the assassination of Russia's ambassador to the same country, the murder of Jo Cox - the first killing of a sitting British MP in more than two decades - the election of Donald Trump. To say the rules are being broken is generous. I'm not sure we're even bothering to keep a copy of the rulebook on the shelf anymore.

So, if you can bring yourself to raise another glass tonight, raise it to the fact that you're lucky to live in New Zealand. Because, as terrible as 2016 was, and as bad as the hangover in 2017 might be, at least we live in a paradise far enough away to be able to see the fire, but not yet feel its heat.