Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Is New Year’s Eve the Worst Holiday?
As a kid, New Year’s Eve fascinated me. It was a night when grown-ups dressed up, drank fancy cocktails and danced across ballroom floors. Granted, my parents only went out a time or two, but I had seen the movies. Most adults had the times of their lives and I couldn’t wait to join them. We kids would fight to stay up late, bang pots and pans and light the illicit firework or two, but it just wasn’t the same.
Once I hit drinking age, I spent several New Year’s Eves at college bars or block parties where I could finally join the excitement. I rarely found much. Most the celebrations were overcrowded nightmares of sweaty throngs and queasy drinkers. Hardly the tuxedo-clad soirées I had imagined as a lad. There wasn’t even a big band, for pity’s sake.
After many disappointing events, I finally figured out why I didn’t care for New Year’s celebrations: They are filled with people who say “WOOO!” I don’t like being in places where people say “WOOO!” The revelers never seem to be having fun, but are desperate to convince everyone around them that they’re having fun.
Like many lost weekends in Las Vegas, most NYE revelers are trying to force themselves to have a good time and failing. And what are we even celebrating? An arbitrary hour on an arbitrary calendar first accepted in the U.S. in 1752. There aren’t even presents.
Wednesday night, I’ll enjoy another quiet evening in, maybe playing a few board games with the family and watching queasy drinkers shout “WOOO!” on my TV. I’ll enjoy a dram of a fine single-malt and shake my head at the poor saps racing home on the freeway at 1:30 a.m. Many readers will roll their eyes at stodgy introverts like myself and enjoy far more exciting celebrations.
But what do you think: Is New Year’s Eve overrated or do you have an evening planned that will change my mind?
A version of this article was published last New Year’s Eve.
Published in General
“But what do you think: Is New Year’s Eve overrated or do you have an evening planned that will change my mind?”
It might look to you as though WOOO-sayers are faking it, but some probably are not. I used to be grim and taciturn, but learned to loosen up and have fun for its own sake. When I was younger and had no kids, I went to several New Year’s Eve parties of various kinds and had a good time. We danced, we talked, we ate, we drank. I enjoy being in a crowd of people who are there to enjoy themselves, whether it’s at a carnival, a concert, an art festival or something else. I turn down the critical faculty, and the irony, and just let myself have fun. It’s simple, and doesn’t call for analysis.
“I don’t like being in places where people say “WOOO!””
OTOH, there are people in the audience at our high school choir concerts who shout, “WOOO!”, after every number, and it is completely out of place, utterly incommensurate with the event and the accomplishments of the choir members, and I cannot stand it.
Forced merriment is never that merry. The years as a kid watching Yankee Doodle Dandy on tv, followed by Guy Lombardo were good, a couple times in the twenties, then blah…
Always enjoyed the later years with the kids shooting fireworks as the wife screamed in terror watching the lab trying to bite the rockets as they hit the ground . Then we would burn the (by then) dried out Christmas tree in the parking lot. Perfect, but where we live it is usually bone cold, as it will be tonight at 15 degrees.
Good time for reflection though. Best new years eve ? Next year for sure.
New Year’s Eve isn’t a holiday. New Year’s Day is the holiday.
On New Year’s Eve, people go out AFTER business hours to celebrate the fact that they don’t have to work the next day.
Look at traditional New Year’s celebrations, festivals, and holy days from cultures and societies around the globe and throughout history. Virtually all of them celebrate the first day of the new year, not the last night of the previous year.
The idea of celebrating the last night of the year is an innovation of the Industrial Revolution, when regimented work hours were instituted and the Holy Day (a day set aside for worship and community) was replaced by the holiday (a day off from one’s job).
Once New Year’s Day was no longer “holy”, it became natural for the actual holiday to become an excuse for recuperation from the previous night’s debauch.
All that being said, I say to look on the bright side. Other “Holy Days” that have been appropriated and transformed into boozy party (St. Patrick’s Day, national independence days, etc) take place on the actual day, meaning that the next day becomes a write-off for the hungover, even though the next day isn’t a holiday. At least New Year’s Day is still a (sorta kinda) genuine “day of rest”.
(Considering how Halloween has been turned into a second New Year’s Eve, perhaps there should be a movement to have All Saint’s Day made an official holiday?)
Another thought: In the post-industrial economy, where work hours are becoming much less regimented (with increased flex time, telecommuting, freelancing and self-employment, “personal days”, etc), the significance of official holidays becomes even more diluted. As more of us make our livings at jobs where we don’t have to be physically in the office every single day as long as we deliver on our employers’/clients’ expectations, every day of the year is a potential holiday.
As such, maybe the post-industrial economy gives conservatives an opportunity to increase the “holiness” of official and/or religious holidays. Over time, as fewer people have to rely on the government to provide them with a day off, there might be an opportunity to inject more traditional meaning into those days already set aside on the calendar for special consideration.
OK. I have a lovely iPad Air 2, that was my Christmas present to myself (thanks, Dad). And I am trying to use that to access Ricochet, rather than my geriatric iPhone 3GS, which I can’t upgrade beyond IOS6.
(Pause while Blue Yeti is observed off somewhere, doing the Happy Dance).
But I can’t ‘comment’ on a comment. Is that just me (I know I’m special), or doesn’t that work?
I was trying to comment on Casey’s ‘degradation of taste’ comment. He’s absolutely right.
It’s not the holiday itself. I like celebrating the coming of the New Year. It’s just that it’s become one more cheap, commercial, holiday among many others.
We shall stay in, raise a dram to absent friends and loved ones (of which/whom there are a depressingly high number this year, both four-legged and two), and wish you all a very Happy New Year. (We shall probably also retire well before midnight. We don’t think it’s obligatory to stay up until the wee hours just to ‘do it right.’)
Also: New Year’s Eve would be way better if it wasn’t in the winter.
I’d much rather go up to the lake with friends, family, beer, hot dogs, and fireworks (like the Fourth of July/Canada Day, or Memorial Day/Victoria Day), than standing in a freezing city street with thousands of drunk idiots, or trying to get a cab in the slush to go to an overpriced restaurant, or sitting at home watching bad TV.
I bet New Year’s Eve is way more fun in the Southern Hemisphere.
One final thought: Like many 20th Century cultural “innovations”, one can blame the modern conception of the New Year’s Eve party on mass broadcast communications.
With the advent of radio, for the first time people all over the country were “educated” as to how the elites in New York City celebrated the new year, all thanks to Guy Lombardo’s radio broadcasts on the CBS and NBC radio networks.
Obviously, if the rich folk in New York City put more emphasis on the night of December 31 than on the actual holiday on January 1st, that’s what the rest of the country should be doing as well!
With the advent of television, the Times Square ball drop (a tradition with only goes back to Dec 31, 1907) took on much greater cultural significance, and the “tradition” of standing outside freezing your bum off in the middle of the winter was born.
In most of the western world prior to the invention of radio, New Year’s Day was the bigger deal, and it was a time for family.
Today, in the post-modern age with Internet narrowcasting increasingly replacing mass broadcasting (coupled with an aging population less interested in debauchery and more interested in nesting with family/friends) I wonder if the “tradition” of the New Year’s Eve party will be (or is already) on the decline.
I know in my town a business group started holding our own version of the “ball drop” last year. While attendance was pretty huge, actual enjoyment of the event was somewhat limited for all except for drunk 19-to-25 years olds (according to post shindig press reports). I wonder if attendance will be smaller this year and/or if attendance will drop as the “millenials” age out of their parting years.
On the other hand, one of the big reasons that the New Year’s Eve party was such a big deal in New York City (as opposed to the family-oriented New Year’s Day) was that it was one of the first American cities to have such a large population of transient young professionals. The New Year’s Eve party catered to the folk who had moved away from their families to seek their fortunes in the big city, and partying at night with their peers made way more sense than gathering together during the day for quiet reflection.
Today, thanks to the post-modern networked economy, this sort of young professional cohort is no longer limited to New York City, which helps explain why the “New Year’s Eve party” proliferated beyond the big apple.
However, with the post-modern networked economy, for more and more people it is also less necessary for young professionals to move away from family to pursue lucrative careers. This also might provide an impetus for New Year’s Day to increase in significance at the expense of New Year’s Eve.
Ugh. As an ER doc over the decades I’ve learned to loathe this holiday.
We refer to it as “Amateur Night”, when all the people not in “training” are out drinking too much and partying too much. So lots of “alcohol poisoning” formerly known as “drunk”. Lots of stupid trauma from fights, falls etc. And of course ALWAYS a couple of horrific car crashes around 3 am. Working in Wisconsin that meant lousy roads, dangerous transports and usually no Life Flight Helicopters when you need them most. Cannot tell you how many times the year has started out with me giving tragic news to someones parents, or wife or kids.
Stay home, have a toddy or some champaign, watch the ball fall and count your blessings.
Fess up. You lifted this straight from the Canada Visitor’s Bureau.
Eh. Nothing changes except the rent is due. I wish New Year’s Day came with the Spring solstice, so every year begins – and ends – with reasonably clement weather. Around here it ends in cold darkness and begins in dark coldness.
<blows on paper noisemaker, but just a bit so you know it’s intended sarcastically.>
The obvious solution is to move to our town in South Carolina, but you would then end up working for our local newspaper, which goes by the affectionate name of “The Aiken SubStandard”. Just ask D.C. McAllister – she used to work for it!
As one might imagine, outdoor New Year’s Eve festivities are pretty rare in the Great White North. Like I mentioned earlier, my town only started organizing an outdoor “ball drop” party last year.
It’s long been a big night for the nightclubs and restaurants, of course, but really no more so than St. Patrick’s Day or Halloween.
The really big day for partying in my town is July 1.
The New Year’s Day levée is a pretty strong tradition up here in the Great White North, especially in rural communities and the Maritime provinces.
The local city government, or local business, or even just families, organize a pretty big reception event for folk to gather together and welcome the new year.
It’s like, Christmas is for families to gather and drive each other nuts, and by contrast the New Year’s levée is for friends, colleagues, and associates to gather and socialize before having to throw themselves back into the business of the new year.
Sorta like a “welcome back” party: “We haven’t seen you since the blizzard. Everybody still alive?”
One might suggest that the levée celebrates that the days are gonna start getting longer again, a very significant event in a land where Seasonal Affective Disorder could be a national symbol right alongside the beaver and the maple leaf.
The tradition was started by the Governor-General (unless Wikipedia lies to me). Might be something you Yankee conservatives could emulate to restore some meaning to the actual January 1 holiday?
Lest I oversell the tradition’s wholesome community image, be aware that in some rarefied locales the refreshments at the levée are designed to be hangover “cures”.
I had a boss from Nova Scotia who liked to host a levée at his house where he served “Moose Milk”. Take a couple of quarts of vanilla ice cream, put ’em in a punch bowl, allow ’em to melt completely, mix in a bottle of rum (preferably Newfoundland Screech), and serve as a drink.
He was a retired army officer. Not a lot to do for fun on Atlantic Canada army bases…
Welcome to Canada!
Shake some slush off your shoes and enjoy an overpriced maple meal served by a real life depressed Canuck!
Also, our coins are different!
Yeah, not a heck of a lot of winter tourism in Canadian cities.
On the other hand, I imagine that the New Year’s Eve parties at places like Whistler or Mont Tremblant are pretty epic.
Ackshully, I was imagining Times Square…
I bet you were.
It was the worst, until someone came up with Kwanzaa.
There’s a holiday called Sweetest Day? The things you learn on Ricochet…
I have the same problem on my older iPad. Ricochet is not too friendly to it.
Labour Day’s pretty awful for anybody that already had August off from work/school. It does nothing but add insult to injury.
I actually prefer New Year’s Day to its overrated Eve.
I like getting a day off work in the middle of the week, I wish more holidays were still observed on the actual day instead of transferred to the nearest Monday. I’ll sleep in, go to Mass (it’s a Solemnity for us Catholics), catch some of the Rose Parade, then settle in for 6+ hours of the Rose and Sugar Bowls.
Happy New Year!
There’s also May Day, the celebration of International Communism. And Earth Day, which is pretty much the same thing.
Good point, as a kid I loathed Labor Day since it marked the last day of my favorite time of year: Summer Vacation. That association still hasn’t entirely worn off.
Plus, a holiday in honor of labor unions? Meh.
I find it especially silly that out here on the West Coast all the major networks show the Times Square ball drop at “midnight” on 3 hour tape delay.
Especially when you can now watch it live at 9:00PM Pacific on the news channels. Though this has given rise to parties catering to families and older folks where everyone watches the Times Square ball drop live, celebrates the New Year at 9:00, and goes home early.
I read an article today about a professor who wants to replace the Gregorian calendar with something a little more consistent, with equally-sized months and no need for recalibrating every few years. He also wants to get rid of time zones and daylight savings.
The point of the story: He celebrates News Year’s Eve according to Greenwich Time.
Which is, of course, as we all know, an irredeemably racist thing to do.
;-)
How do you avoid recalibration without making days something like 24.06 hours long?
The article didn’t go deeply into how this particular sausage is made. It merely presented the sausage as delicious.
As a general rule, I agree.