New Year’s Eve Plans

Today is New Year’s Eve, the second dumbest holiday of all time, Labor Day being the all-time dumbest. The million or so people who cram themselves into Times Square to watch the ball drop are exhibit A in the case against human’s being the superior species on our planet. New Year’s Eve is when every restaurant has a line out the door, a limited menu, watered down drinks and inflated prices. No thanks.

In the old days when our kids were little and all our friends had little ones, Pam and I used to throw a huge New Year’s Eve bash at our house which featured kid-centric activities, games, and arts and crafts. We all wore goofy hats and ate fantastic food all night until the kids were exhausted. Then a few years later when I was working in the Youth group at church, our house was crammed full of teenagers, sometimes over fifty of them. We fed them, gave them free reign of the place and successfully kept them off the streets and out of harm’s way. When the ball dropped, they all gathered in our living room, began jumping up and down in rhythm and throwing homemade confetti skyward. it was a madhouse and we cleaned up confetti for literally months afterwards. Looking back on those years causes me to question my sanity. What on earth were we thinking? 

Now, the kids are gone. We have had tons of people and dogs traipsing through this house for the last two weeks. Now that they are gone we are thankful for the peace and quiet and just a little bit disturbed by it at the same time. All we see when we look around are all the Christmas decorations that need to be packed back up and taken to the attic. Looming out there in the future is the beginning of a new year, a new decade. We need to get to it but we can’t yet because of the dead days surrounding this random, disjointed and non-sensical New Year’s Eve...thing.

Our plans for the day involve a nice lunch out together and then a shopping trip to buy clothes for me. I don’t trust myself to make fashion decisions. That’s why I bring Pam along. I also don’t care for shopping of any kind, especially clothes, so I only do it once or maybe twice a year. I remember one time a couple of years ago when we were at Kohl’s and I was having a terrible time making my mind up about what kind of underwear to buy. It was a moment of....brief indecision.

Happy New Year’s everyone!