Your December holiday of choice is over. It’s now time for everyone’s favorite holiday, New Year’s Day.
Actually, people don’t celebrate on January 1st. The masses gather around the night before, New Year’s Eve, at Times Square (or a TV with a live feed of Times Square) and anxiously wait for midnight, when a new day, month and year begins.
Time to be a late December scrooge: New Year’s Eve is a big fat joke. Here are three signs you know you have a fake, pointless holiday:
(1) The holiday stands as nothing more than a testament to our Gregorian calendar.
(2) The holiday itself isn’t celebrated, but rather the night leading up to it.
(3) The Chinese have their own version, and they do a better job at celebrating it.
If those were the only reasons New Year’s Eve is a waste of time, the column would end after this sentence. (As you can clearly see, it doesn’t.)
If Christmas is about being with family, New Year’s Eve is about being with that same family — one week later — and making sure they didn’t return any of their gifts. Like any holiday, it has identifiable customs, but unlike a real holiday, these customs seem drab and forced, such as the midnight kiss.
According to ancient New Year’s lore, we are to embrace our loved ones when the clock tolls twelve, lest Dick Clark perish from the earth. It has kept him alive to this day, although Regis Philbin will be filling in as host of “Rockin’ New Year’s Eve,” due to Clark’s failing health. We might have to kiss two people this time around so he recovers.
Legend has it we must also make “New Year’s resolutions.” These resolutions, in the words of our forefathers, must be of an overly optimistic nature, such as “losing 50 pounds,” “quitting smoking, drinking and ecstasy — cold turkey,” “curing cancer” or “coaching the Browns to the Super Bowl.” They must never be attainable goals, such as “quitting drinking ginger ale,” “passing UNIV 100” or “finding a typo in the BG News.”
Those are the only two known, documented rules of New Year’s Eve. They were written on stone tablets as brought to us by Moses’ brother from Pasadena, Roses. I found them in the backyard of my house in Sylvania, Ohio, so they’re bound to be accurate.
In reality, the holiday is more or less an excuse to hang out with friends and family. A lot of my friends told me that is the standard New Year’s Eve format they follow. Based on my personal experiences, any plans more extravagant than this becomes dull quickly.
Hence, the night consists of ordering out for dinner.
Domino’s Pizza conducts an annual survey that claims two-thirds of Americans stay home on New Year’s Eve. Last year’s survey said 42 percent of people planned on ordering pizza that night.
Thanksgiving has turkey. Christmas has ham. Independence Day has barbecue. New Year’s Eve has … pepperoni and extra cheese?
The only other holiday to which pizza might be attributed is the Super Bowl. Unless you’ve been looking forward to the Liberty Bowl all year, New Year’s Eve football doesn’t have much to offer.
Sure, it’s a world event, but we don’t all celebrate it at the same time. When the clock strikes midnight in New York City, Times Square goes nuts, but Californians are thinking, “What’s the big deal? It’s only 9 p.m.” The rest of the world then cheers at different hour intervals.
If you’re up in arms about America’s unilateral actions, you might want to re-think your stance on New Year’s celebrations.
All of these factors notwithstanding, New Year’s Eve brought out the sheer idiocy in man five years ago, when people celebrated the “new millennium” on December 31, 1999. Despite mathematicians and scientists insisting the new millennium didn’t begun until 2001, the world ignored those nerds and simply partied heartier.
Some people even thought January 1, 2000 marked the apocalypse, so they stocked up on bottled water, duct tape and biohazard suits. One of those people came up to me back in ’99, when I worked at a department store. She was looking for a manual can opener because she “was getting ready for Y2K.” (If 2000 was indeed the end of the world, a means to eat Spaghetti O’s isn’t your biggest concern.)
Since there was no Year 2000 tragedy, the tradition of New Year’s Eve lives on. On Friday, America will eat pizza, hang out with its friends, watch TV and kiss some arbitrary person of the opposite sex. Then it will wake up around noon, thinking it shouldn’t have drank so much last night.
That’s every weekend in Bowling Green. There’s no need to make it a world holiday just because it commemorates the day people can finally start using the page-a-day calendars they received for Christmas.
Matt was bored enough to write something over break that nobody would read. You can reach him at [email protected].
