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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
Plus the fact that no one is laboring on Labor Day.
When I worked on union jobs, union members got fined by the union if they worked on Labor Day.
When I was a kid I thought the whole point of Labour Day was to taunt people by reminding them that they’d have to get back to work the next day.
Like, if New Year’s Eve was actually called Hangover Day, Thanksgiving was called Leftovers Day, and Christmas was called Get Out Of My House Day.
I too dislike WOOO. I avoid any place that I suspect WOOOing may occur. I also dislike crowded places, loud noises, and drinking anywhere other than my home. That and it is an utterly unremarkable holiday. No battles won, no religious figures born, nothing even worthy of a WOO.
Hey, what’s going on here?
Obviously what is needed is a really corny happy ending and I know just the right one.
Shut up and deal would you.
Regards,
Jim
See? Jack Lemmon stayed home alone on New Year’s Eve and he still got the girl.
There’s clearly no need to fight the crowds.
I misread that as “sweaty thongs” and was quite taken aback. I couldn’t quite construct the reference, but knew it was not any NYE gathering I had ever attended.
Clearly, Mesa Arizona is a wilder town than one might imagine.
;-)
May Day and other Commie holidays are worse.
It’s amateur hour for alcoholics….
We normally just have one other couple over, eat a fairly simple dinner around 5:00 Pm then play board games, or cards. Tonight was two rounds of Pandemic, then two games of hand and foot (midnight around mid-point of second game) then one round of Scotland Yard, with a lot of good conversation, a couple of good drinks, and presto its 2:45 AM, and we are saying good by and going to bed. But a tremendous lot of fun, and no worry about driving long distances or partying with too many people. We’ve done this for a lot of years and like it.
Since I’ve turned 21, I’ve been a bartender, police officer and emergency room nurse, so I’ve pretty much always had to work during New Year’s Eve. I have a lot more fun than the poor idiots I’m arresting, pulling out of wrecked cars or bandaging up.
Among bar district cops, this is a topic for lively debate: which holiday is the worst? The top 3 are generally Halloween, New Years’, and/or St. Patrick’s. I am generally a believer in Halloween as the worst (something about wearing masks makes people lose their minds), but New Years’ is always pretty bad.
I haven’t had New Years’ off in about ten years, so I can tell you that you aren’t missing anything, Jon. New Years’ Eve is the night that the crappy bar that isn’t worth going to under normal circumstances has a hundred-dollar cover charge, and every fool who can’t handle their liquor is out trying to handle their liquor.
This year, as midnight chimed and the New Year rang in, rather than sharing champagne and a smooch with my favorite redhead, I was standing in the back of an ambulance, trying to convince a guy not to go to jail.
I failed. Because New Years’ Eve. That tells you all you need to know.
Commenting on #50 because comment on comment doesn’t work.
Thanks for the feedback, Kozak. My iPad could hardly be any newer, or more up-to-date, though. I will try and find that bug-posting thread from months ago and report it. Or maybe i’ll wait for the promised redesign . . .
We live 3 miles from the biggest fireworks show in the world (spanning the length of the Las Vegas strip and up to downtown). So we woke up at midnight, watched the show, and went back to sleep. (Cue sound of party horns and popping champagne bottles.) All things considered, there could be worse holidays.
If you must stand in freezing weather for hours with a crowd of hundreds of thousands of strangers, Las Vegas really is a better choice than Times Square. But if the TV cameras were here instead of there, then the East Coast people would have to wait until 3:00 a.m. for New Year. So let them drop their stupid ball. Dropping the ball is actually the perfect symbolism for a lefty city anyway.
We are such pros out my way, we go to sleep on New Year’s eve and drink champagne at noon. On New Year’s Day. :)
Wonderful!
However, people, I’m a bit chagrined to learn that so many of my fellow conservatives seem like anhedonics. The calendar gives you an opportunity to celebrate, gather together with friends or family, imbibe some adult beverages in a socially-acceptable manner, and basically be joyful.
Our goal, you understand, is to make conservatism attractive, in contrast with the joyless, humorless scolds on the left. But most of what I’m reading above is joyless and humorless.
Nobody says you have to go out and toot horns and throw confetti, (as for us, we stayed in and watched a screwball comedy) but at least try not to look like a pious leftist about everything. The great Dennis Prager would tell you that happiness is a moral obligation.
The nation is counting on you.
That’s OK. They don’t labor on the other days, either.
I have been ‘over’ NYE for many years now. I just never ‘got it’ kind of like you. a non event where everyone took the date and the late hour to get wasted. Not being much of a drinker, it never made sense to me.
I remember when the Y2K fear was circulating the country. I had a few friends and acquaintances explaining to me precisely how planes would fall from the sky and trains would mysteriously ram into buildings downtown. my oldest daughter was 9 years old. just old enough to start listening to grown ups talk. she asked me one day if the world was going to end, if God was going to blow up the planet. I told her it was nothing but a date. just like every other date. it was, in the end, just a number. besides that, it was wrong. Historians will tell you our calendar has been messed up, manipulated and miswritten many times. at this point, it is just an aid to keep records.
so, New Year’s Eve, like every other date, is just a number. it is dark and cold like every other number at that time of year. the only problem is, my neighbors, in their own attempts to convince themselves of the holiday, start at around 11PM, blowing things up (there is now a fireworks store less than a mile from my neighborhood) and keep going until around 12:30. All I want to do is go back to sleep and work on my garden plans in the morning.
In Scotland, it used to be that the New Year was celebrated at home with family. It was expressing thankfulness that the new baby year had survived and was here to stay.
As has been mentioned, in northern climes the Winter Solstice is very real.
Hey, do you see me criticizing your lifestyle?!
Thought of as the Anti-Christmas bacchanal without the religious overtones, New Year’s is nonetheless a celebration of Anno Domini 2015. Sorry, it too is a Christian holiday.
I was amazed at the world-wide celebration of 2000. The middle east, China — everywhere — atheist, pagan and Islam included, celebrated the event as meaningful. Why? There are many calendars. Islamic newspapers publish two dates on the masthead — AD and the Islamic year. China, famously, has it’s own New Year. Yet the whole world celebrates January 1 as the New Year.
The partying and pretense to “fun” is less than satisfying perhaps because we aren’t seeing the day for what it is: a marking of another year of our Lord.
Any excuse for champagne, alcohol and smoked salmon and special food is virtuous, but for a few reasons , four things have made NYE progressively less of an event; maybe I was extra naîve early on?
–The Internet and globalization have erased the notion that something magical or significant happens at midnight; waking up to hear it’s New Year’s already in Australia kind of kills it a bit.
–Dick Clark, RIP
–loud parties, the “real” NYE parties, never appealed to me, and now I’m old enough to admit it.
–As you get older, NYE parties become kid-friendly events, so, no longer so NYE’y
–My reference for a New Year’s celebration has become, more and more Rosh Hashana, so just call me a killjoy.
On the other hand, New Year’s Day is quite possibly the single day of the year on which it’s easiest to rest and sleep late. Even on Shabbat, I either have to wake up early to go to synagogue, or I don’t go, and feel guilty.
I celebrated by driving home from AZ — in the snow oddly enough — and falling asleep on the couch at 9:30.
The only worse holiday is Labor Day, though the weather is better then.