With the close of December, we enter the long gray season, the time of the toughest weather and the fewest holidays. Know why January is such a popular time for a vacation from drinking alcohol? Maybe it appeals to the Puritan strain in the nation's psychological makeup. After the festivities of November and December, it may be only natural that people in a nation whose early and most influential settlers included John Winthrop might feel drawn toward abnegation, renunciation, and self-purification, not to mention maybe losing a few pounds.
But the other reason is that it's easy. January is not a festive month. The first of its two officially sanctioned days off is traditionally a day of recovery from overindulgence; its second is dedicated to the memory of a murdered hero and reflections on the very large outstanding balance on America's IOUs to people of color. By January 1, many people are all partied out, so the odds are good that, for this month at least, your sobriety won't be imperiled by that awkward feeling of being one of the only non-drinkers in a crowd that is reveling as usual. February and March bring occasions of a more festive air, sort of, although—despite including many elements that seem like they should add up to fun occasions—the days devoted to Saints Valentine and Patrick are easily the least bearable allegedly "fun" holidays of the year.
I'm not opposed to getting days off from work in memory of important personages, but let's all agree that such days never really feel like holidays, by which I mean days of celebration answering what feel like ancient, even primal, urges to mark particular seasons. Since time immemorial, humans in various places on earth have performed fertility rites in the spring, orgiastically celebrated the warmth of the sun on the summer solstice, shown gratitude for their harvest in the fall, and attempted to ensure the return of the sun with big fires and flagons of mead or prosecco whatever on the winter solstice.
It is the holidays that come around these points in the year that feel truly festive, I think, because they naturally lend themselves to communal celebration by connecting to these primal occasions, whatever we call them and whatever their ostensible official purpose is. For me, these are Memorial Day (I know what it's really "about," but I also think that people are drawn to outdoor gatherings and feasts on this date not because they don't care about dead soldiers but because it is (1) a widely observed day off that (2) comes at a point in the year roughly halfway between when humans have long observed fertility rites and the joys of midsummer, and so they can't really help it); Labor Day, Halloween, and Thanksgiving (all fitting into the harvest celebration category); and Christmas (the reason for this season is of course the winter solstice, the longstanding celebration of which inspired early Christians to pretend Jesus was born at that point in the year rather than try to build a new festival season from scratch during a different season).
Depending on the traditions you grew up with, you may slot some different/additional named holidays into some of these categories, but I think you'll find that all of the holidays you regard as "fun" have the air of either a fertility rite, a midsummer orgy, a harvest festival, or a raging against darkest winter + petition to the sun to return. The rest are just days off with good sales.
Except for New Year's Eve, which occupies a more ambiguous position. You could make the argument that it connects to the primal need to party at/near the winter solstice, like Christmas and the Yuletide generally. For some reason, though, New Year's Eve doesn't seem to me to fit, well, anywhere. This so-called holiday has long left me cold.
New Year's Eve parties are among the many things to which the pandemic put the kibosh this year, at least among people of good sense. Here's what I'm wondering: How many people were sorry to miss out, and how many were grateful for the excuse?
Put me in the latter camp, generally speaking.
It's not that I mind socializing with a drink in my hand from time to time, lord knows. There is just something unappealing about a party where it feels basically foreordained that I must remain until at least midnight, regardless of how I'm feeling, who else is present, how much I'm actually enjoying myself, and so forth. I'm not necessarily opposed to staying up until midnight, if there's a good reason to do so. It's just that it is rare that I find such a reason—maybe once or twice a year—and the goal of marking the arrival of a certain second in a certain time zone is not one of them, in and of itself.
A few years back, I did have the experience of attending what was by any measure a pretty worthwhile and memorable New Year's Eve party. Petra and I joined about a dozen friends and neighbors for a gathering in an old mansion a few blocks uphill from where I sit writing this. Everyone enjoyed a well-provisioned victuals table and open bar while waiting for the new year to be rung in by our host playing Rhapsody in Blue on a grand piano in the living room.
The mansion had been donated to the local college, which uses it as housing for its artist-in-residence program. That year, the sole occupant was our said host, a well-regarded British pianist specializing in Gershwin, among other composers. This was not the first time that he had played this gorgeous piece of music on New Year's Eve, and he had worked out a precise timing so that a certain crescendo would coincide with the stroke of midnight. (I confess that the particulars escape me now.)
As we stood near the room's big front windows, the lights of Waldhurst twinkling below us, and listened to the music build and swell, I knew that this was a late night I wouldn't regret the next morning, even if it probably would turn out that I had had one or three too many glasses of Maker's. The occasion, in other words, was special enough to warrant staying up until midnight—but this had nothing in particular to do with New Year's Eve and would have been true on any night of the year.
In stark contrast to the specialness of that occasion, to my mind, stands the more traditional type of New Year's Eve party, the prix-fixe dinner at a white tablecloth restaurant followed by dancing, drinks, and "free" champagne at midnight.
The only one of this type of New Year's Eve party I've ever attended was at the Kieler Yacht Club, in Kiel, Germany, when I was 21. My mother's father died just before Christmas that year, and I flew to Germany to meet my parents, brother, and other family members for the funeral. A few days later, and at the behest of my aunt, who always stayed at the club on her visits to Kiel, we all brought my grandmother, the grieving widow, to the club's New Year's Eve party. This was an interesting anthropological experience, I will admit, and a fond memory, in a way, but there was nothing about the basic framework of the night that inspired in me any desire to seek out similar New Year's Eve observances later on.
For years, I have parroted the line that New Year's Eve is "amateur night" as one reason why I prefer to stay in on the last night of the year. I've said it so often that, Googling it just now, I realized I had forgotten what it really refers to—not the resentment of some Fitzgeraldian bon vivant or Bukowskian alleycat at being forced to bend elbows next to people who order elaborate, multi-ingredient mixed drinks and then forget to leave a tip, but rather the reluctance of many if not most people in the hospitality industry to work this kind of event.
New Year's Eve parties, this line of thinking goes, attract a high proportion of people who do not often attend public social events. These "amateurs," who are less likely to know their current tolerance for and reaction to alcohol, are then encouraged to hang out, drinks in hand, until midnight, when everyone is supposed to dance with and then kiss the perfect person to the perfect accompaniment of fireworks and cheers as the key to kicking off the perfect year. The arbitrarily extended timeframe and the anxieties that may be triggered by the heavy cultural expectations around the night's climax combine to trigger overindulgence and the misbehavior, strife, and vomit—not to mention car crashes—that can result.
Fair enough—except why is this my line? I've never bartended at a New Year's Eve party, and the closest I've ever come to the allegedly widespread problems with such events was as one of the problem makers.
On the New Year's Eve during my senior year of high school, there was a large party at the house of a classmate, hosted, in the absence of her parents, by her older brother, who had graduated a year or two earlier. Before making our entrance, and unsure exactly what sort of party and, more importantly, party refreshments to expect, my friends and I paused in a nearby alley to fortify ourselves with—in my case—an imprudently large amount of Jim Beam.
I had left home with high hopes for this evening—I was in the early stages of flirting with a girl in my class, and she had agreed to meet me on the dance floor a little before midnight—and a generous lashing of Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey raised them even higher. But by 11:30 I was throwing up as silently as I could in a locked bathroom in the house's entry hall while other partygoers desperate to relieve themselves banged on the door and loudly inquired what was taking me so long.
By five to midnight, and with no notice to the girl in question, I and one of my friends were cabbing it to his house, where I'd already been planning to spend the night. I rode with my window rolled down, the frigid air washing over me and the driver's anxious eyes seeking me out in his rearview mirror as he periodically reminded me to tell him if I needed him to pull over.
If, in later years, that cab driver ever used the phrase "amateur night" to describe why he preferred not to work on New Year's Eve, I may very well have been one of the examples he had in mind. It is small consolation to consider that, over the years, he probably saw much worse.
As soon as Axl and Belle learned that there is a widespread custom of staying up until midnight on New Year's Eve, they demanded to partake. They seemed so excited at the prospect of finally experiencing the post-bedtime joys that their parents seemed to reserve for themselves so jealously—never mind that it's usually all Petra and I can do to keep our eyes open for even an hour after we've tucked the children into bed. There is a superstition that what one does on New Year's Day is what one will find oneself doing all year. As someone with sleep issues, my preference would be something like "waking up refreshed after a good night's sleep," but the children had other ideas.
Fine, you can stay up until midnight, we were finally forced to concede, then—when they weren't looking—we reset several strategically chosen clocks so that the midnight in question would be Sao Paulo's, not New York's. This subterfuge was good for only the first year, however, and over the succeeding three or four years we've fallen into the following routine.
To start the night, the four of us drop in at a neighbor's annual kids-and-all party. The adults stand around nibbling, drinking, and chatting while about a dozen children race around the house on the usual inscrutable kid business.
No later than 10 p.m., we retreat home, build nests in the TV room, and watch movies until just before midnight. Then we dial up a stream from Times Square, watch the ball drop, perform the obligatory jubilation at the arrival of this arbitrarily chosen moment in time, and go to bed.
In my book, all of this is more a matter of endurance than enjoyment. Most of the moments that make up these evenings are unobjectionable, but then for years I've found it difficult to sleep past 5 a.m. no matter how late I stay up the night before, and the Oakes children also do not deal well with disrupted sleep patterns. At the party, no matter how much I may be enjoying chatting with friends, my attention is always at least partially on the children so we can withdraw before things go completely sideways. And then, of course, Petra and I must pass New Year's Day tiptoeing around two exhausted children, doing our best to help keep the number of tantrums and arguments to a bearable level, and counting the seconds until we can all collapse once more into bed—preferably as early as possible. All in all, a less than auspicious start to the new year, to my mind.
I know it's probably rotten of me to resist this kind of thing. My parents didn't, and I actually have fond memories of New Year's Eves from my childhood. My parents never went out, so it was a family occasion. We sat by the fire and read books we'd received for Christmas. We played poker. And, at the end, we watched the ball drop on television. We may even have banged on pots and pans out in front of the house a time or two.
Obviously, Christmas was the headliner of the winter break and New Year's Eve was not what I looked forward to, but it was kind of fun, a sort of dessert concluding the feast of two blessed weeks off from school and all of the domestic warmth and togetherness that went with it.
I hate to deprive my children of this kind of pleasure, but I still can't see why staying up until midnight is a key factor.
This year, as it turned out, I didn't have to.
The night before New Year's Eve—New Year's Eve Eve, if you will—I woke at around 1 a.m. and could not fall back asleep. After several rounds of tossing and turning, reading for twenty minutes, and tossing and turning some more, I finally rose for the day at around 3:30.
I was amazed at how not-bad I felt all morning, although by early afternoon I found that I could not concentrate on much of anything for more than a few minutes at a time.
At around 5 p.m., we put on National Lampoon's Vacation as the night's first movie. I actually made it all the way through but could barely keep my eyes open during the classic Twilight Zone episode we watched next, and the children—who had been briefed on my rough night—seemed neither surprised nor offended when, around 9:30 p.m., I announced I was headed to bed.
I slept the sleep of the dead and, for the first time in about five years, woke on New Year's Day feeling refreshed and on top of my game.
When the rest of my family woke up, I asked how their celebration had turned out after I'd gone to bed.
"We watched Jungle Book, which ended about 11:30," Petra told me. "Axl stood up and announced he was tired and going to bed, and Belle followed suit."
By all accounts they were all asleep before midnight.
Maybe these kids have some sense after all.
