My least favorite holiday

My notes in Google Drive say this is from 2010, but the 2012 Aztec reference sounds like it's in the past, so who knows? I'm too lazy to look it up, but New Year's Eve/Day is still my least favorite holiday. Ugh. — CS 

If somebody set out to design the most depressing holiday imaginable, he could do no better – or worse – than New Year’s.

Every part of this so-called celebration might cause lunatics to chew off their restraints or dogs to howl like they’ve heard those whistles that blow at canine-only frequencies. This year is even worse, because we’re ushering out a decade that nobody has successfully named (the Aughts? the Zeros? the Ohs?) and preparing to ring in a decade that also lacks a good name – the Teens won’t fit for a few more years, and the Tens sounds like a brand of adult diapers. How can you wave it goodbye or invite it in when you don’t know what to call it? Maybe that’s why the Aztecs predicted the world would end in 2012 – to spare us the inconvenience of deciding what to label another decade.

Anyway, here are just a few of the reasons I would avoid New Year’s if I could:

1. That depressing song. “Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind” is a wonderful way to kick a holiday into high festive mode. “Should wrists be slashed and brains be fried” is a suitable follow-up, but Scottish poet Robert “Bobby” Burns decided to go with slightly more upbeat references to “flames of love extinguished” and “heart now grown so cold” instead. (These are the lines that most people just hum as the life of the party dons a lampshade and cha-chas across the room.) If you stick with the song long enough, you get to some happier stuff, but that’s like enduring hours of painful root canals to suck on a cold cherry Popsicle afterward.

2. That depressing hour. Waiting until midnight to celebrate a holiday is great if you’re a vampire or a late-night television talk show fan. (And really, what’s the difference?) If you follow Ben Franklin’s maxim of early to bed, early to rise, then you can hardly hope to wake up Jan. 1 healthy, wealthy and wise. Instead, you roll out of bed surly, burly, with bloodshot eyes. Why can’t the New Year arrive at a more civilized hour, like 6 p.m.?

3. That depressing meal. Pork’s all right, but sauerkraut? Ugh. Little strands of fiberglass warmed all day over low heat that taste like little strands of fiberglass warmed all day over low heat. And if you don’t eat some, the legend goes, you won’t be prosperous in the coming year. The only people who prosper from this tradition are the people who pluck sauerkraut off sauerkraut trees (maybe munchkins who were kicked out of the Lollipop Guild for behavior unbecoming to little people) and package it in those oily plastic bags. Is there a sauerkraut subsidy in the U.S., and do my taxes support it? I hope not.

4. Those depressing resolutions. No time like midnight to compile a laundry list of all our faults and failures and determine to fix them all, especially those of us who have been around long enough to do the same thing a few dozen times already, especially on stomachs full of sauerkraut and booze, which could make even the gastrointestinal equivalent of Old Ironsides swear off excess food and drink for the year – or at least the week.

Every year I make the same resolution: To be more tolerant and less judgmental. What does it mean? I don’t know exactly, but it shuts up anybody who asks and sends them skittering off in some other direction, and it’s better than saying you have no resolutions at all, which is like declaring yourself a Democrat in the middle of a GOP convention.

5. Those long winter days to come. When you sing “Auld Lang Syne,” you’re not only slamming the door on the last 12 months, but on the whole holiday season – Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanza, Wear Brown Shoes Day and Oatmeal Muffin Day – and saying hello to long, cold months of winter, unrelieved by days off from work, which you couldn’t take anyway because you’re too busy paying off all the bills that you accrued in November and December.

Is there a “Bah, Humbug?” equivalent for New Year’s? I don’t think so – just another reason why it’s my least favorite holiday.


cschillig@the-review.com.