The Eve of the Eve of the New Year

December 30, 2018

The Eve of the Eve of the New Year

Is there anyone else out there who detests New Year’s Eve?  Not that getting together with friends and family for a celebration is inherently detestable, but on this one night, the gathering seems a little too forced and most parties are full of strangers who you’ve never seen before and will likely never see again.  

Don’t even think about showing up at one of these shindigs in your ratty gender-neutral jeans and a worn tee without a date and no real career plans because this puts you in the LOSER category like nothing else ever will.  Boom!  The sound of the door slamming, shutting your scruffy self in the cell reserved for people with no ambition, echoes loudly in the minds of the party goers who adhered to the mandate that regardless of the truth this one night you must put on a show for the world. If you don’t, then well…LOSER might as well be tattooed on your forehead.  

Even here deep in the Piney Woods in East Texas, where fashion is often disregarded as nothing more than big city nonsense, we know that on New Year’s Eve, tinsel trumps substance.  Even though we know that tinsel is nothing more than glittery crap (don’t hate the writer, mom, for using one of your most hated words) people put on to mask the flaws in their lives, it is required attire for the event.  If that isn’t bad enough, our ordinary dull lives must be glossed over to make it seem like life (or at least the future) is wide open and wonderful.  

Is it any wonder that we wake up on January 1 feeling whipped and a bit whiney?  

Is it any wonder that on New Year’s Day we find those useless resolutions of change buzzing in our brains like World War II Kamikazes on a bombing raid?  Their rat-a-tat-tat causing our head to feel like it’s going to explode? 

Resolutions fail because change is hard.  We know this.  Yet, year after year we compile a list to rival Letterman’s famous top ten.  Our lists are filled with resolutions that we know will fall by the wayside before January closes the door on the first month of the new year, but we are compelled to make them anyway.  Some of us will even go to the trouble to write them down faithfully, even numbering them from least important to most important, and seal them in envelops marked Open January 1, 2019, as if that will somehow make them impossible to break.  

So, here’s a proposal—proposals are big on New Year’s Eve, you know—let’s take the eve of the eve and make it a real moment.  Gather together with the people you cherish the most and celebrate what these people mean to you.  Immerse yourself in the love and friendship that sustains you throughout the year.  Use this as your amour against the false gaiety that surrounds most New Year’s Eve bashes.  That’s not to say you can’t join in on the “fun” on the final night of the old year, if that’s your thing.  Just keep it real this year.  

One final note from a future old fuddy-duddy: Any celebration that requires adult beverages to bring life to it, is probably full of glittery tinsel worshipers and best avoided to begin with.  

Got no people?  Then, friend, your resolution for this year better be to mend fences and/or make a few real friends.  No one should go through this life alone.  

Happy Eve of the Eve of the New Year 2018.

graphics from Google images and clip art labeled for reuse.

The Dreary Days of December.

December 28, 2017

The Dreary Days of December have come again!

Have you ever noticed that the week between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day seems drearier than the rest of the year?

The presents are opened, the stockings are empty, the Christmas decorations have lost some of their luster...and we find ourselves wishing for summer.

   It could be the sugar crash that most of us experience.  Or it might be the symbolic end of another year, although birthdays are a better anniversary for the passage of years, regardless of the annual year-end countdowns that fill our airways the last week of December.  

    But this insidious feeling of bleakness has its roots sunk deep in our psyche.  We have long been led to believe that dark, dreary, and dull equal depressing.  There is actually some science behind this notion.  It’s called a lack of Vitamin D.  The most potent source of Vitamin D, which is not actually a vitamin, is sunlight. 

    Think about it. 

    December is the calendar opposite of June, with the winter equinox being diametrically opposite the summer solstice—the shortest day of the year and the longest day of the year in terms of sunlight.  So, maybe it makes sense that December seems dreary and depressing.  December averages 8 hours of sunlight each day.  Considering most people work 8-10 hours a day, that means we go to work in the dark and leave work in the dark.  Slogging through each day as if we are mired in syrupy mud, brain fogged by too much food, beverage, and family, depression etching its mournful buzzwords in our collective conscious because Christmas seems more about spending money than spending time with loved ones, is it any wonder that we flounder a bit.

  

     However, it seems, despite myths to the contrary, that all this dark, dreariness does not make us suicidal.  Depressed, yes; suicidal, no! This might be the one bright spot in these otherwise dark days—suicide rates actually drop during December. According to those in the know (therapists, shrinks, counselors, and various others with alphabet strings behind their names), we bring these depressing times on ourselves by feeling the need to buy a bigger, better holiday.

     Whatever the reason for this season of dreary days, Merle Haggard said it best, or should that be sung it best, “if we make it through December, everything's gonna be alright, I know...If we make it through December we’ll be fine.”  Because the sun will rise, and a new day will dawn, and December will be nothing but a memory

If we make it through December.  Here is a link to Merle's song if you would like to give it a listen.