Welcoming a new year

      Do you still go out for New Year’s Eve?

      We don’t, not anymore. For a number of reasons.  

      Let’s be honest: as we have gotten older, it gets harder and harder to stay up late. By midnight, when the ball comes down, we’re generally long gone. Sometimes making it to the end of the 10 o'clock news feels like a real accomplishment.

      Most of the people we know who are about the same age feel the same—they have left New Year’s Eve celebrations to those young enough to watch Saturday Night Live live, not several days later, at a more reasonable time, with YouTube videos. They’ve traded in the late-night festivities for the more humane New Year’s Day brunches and open houses.

      Plus, even if we weren’t needing to go to bed much earlier, we clearly no longer can party until 3 or 4 a.m., like some of us did back in the day. In fact, it is now harder to party at all, particularly when you can’t hear what the other partygoers are saying because the music is too damn loud and too many other people are talking at the same time and you can’t remember for the life of you the name of the partygoer you are trying to talk with.

      Instead of raucous parties, cozy dinner gatherings seem more doable.  

      And of course, as we age, celebrating the end of another year and welcoming a new one also starts to have a slightly different meaning than it used to, at least for some of us.

      Yes, we feel grateful that we’ve made it through one more cycle, that we’ve persisted, seen another birthday, toasted another anniversary, taken another trip, read some more books.

But, somehow, noting the passing of still another year makes some of us—well, me—more aware of how very long we’ve been around, how many New Year’s Eves we’ve seen, and most of all: how could this possibly be 2025?  

How could this happen to those of us born so long ago, born in the 1940s and ‘50s? 2025, c’mon.

      So, I think, this year, this New Year’s Eve, to avoid that realization, we’ll have a nice dinner, just the two of us, watch a nice movie on Netflix, go to bed at a decent hour.  It’s a great way to celebrate.