Blame it on the wine, the holiday, the hour, but this is probably going to be an uncharacteristically sappy post.
This year, sick of disappointing New Year’s Eves and with no promise of anything different, I decided that rather than trying for something great and wishing I’d aimed for a regular Friday night, I aimed even lower and opted for an evening in with my cats and a bottle of wine. Ultimately it was probably a good thing as I appear to have come down with a cold and probably wouldn’t have been up for a party anyway, and I’m not gonna say it was the best New Year’s I’ve ever had, but I can’t think of a better one.
Around 7:30, though, I started to panic. “I can’t spend New Year’s alone!” I thought. I felt guilty, although I wasn’t sure why. I wasn’t wishing for something better to do, but staying home felt like I was breaking the rules. I pulled out my journal.
I wonder how many times you have thought to yourself, “If we had been together at midnight, we would be together now.”
I wonder where you are now, tonight, where you will be when midnight comes again.
The thing is that, as I mentioned before, the New Year is the one holiday that I actually think is worth celebrating. I’m not religious, so Christmas, Easter, Yom Kippur, Kwanzaa, none of them mean a whole lot. A new year, though — that’s something to get excited about. That’s a holiday I can get behind. But how do you celebrate everything that it can represent? I don’t have a problem with the getting drunk and kissing someone thing (and really, maybe if I’d always had someone satisfactory to kiss I wouldn’t have been so disappointed in past years), but it certainly doesn’t seem adequate.
So I wrote a list of things I look forward to doing in the next year (not resolutions, exactly, but things I genuinely look forward to doing), watched Dick Clark, and wrote in my journal.
Here are some of the things I look forward to in 2006, in no particular order:
It’s gonna be a good year for me. I hope for you too.
Sounds like you’re focused. I particularly like the voting against Rick Santorum part, I’m looking forward to that also!
Reading this post brings up of a lot of memories and makes me feel a lot of things, wistful perhaps being one of them. I think that’s allowed at this time of year. It’s a time for introspection, a time for recalling who you are, what you have done … and what you should have done. But it’s also a time of celebration. Although I can’t say that this New Year’s Eve reached that height, as I sat and watched Dick Clark, or at least some sad version of him, I remembered
… Drunk on Champagne and dancing with your lover to Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” … standing with the balcony with your love, staring into each other’s eyes under the reds, greens and blues of the pyrotechnics overhead … and even reuniting with your lost love, like in some crazy dream …
I guess what I’m saying is that New Year’s Eve, like no other holiday, offers the chance for that something … magic maybe is the best way to describe it. I’ve spent one or two alone as well, but I do, and always will, long for the kiss at midnight when it’s not there — and the promise of the better year that goes along with it.
Recently stumbled upon your blog thanks to reading Fred Otteson’s Dillsburg Journal. I love your blog, so far it seems that you must be a wholly delightful and whimsical individual.
Thank you!