New Year's Eve is the absolute worst holiday. Fight me | Hamilton Nolan
New Year's Eve is the absolute worst holiday. Fight me
This article is more than 4 years oldHamilton NolanNew Year’s Day, I will wake up refreshed. And while you’re passed out hungover, I will steal the money from your pockets
Rejoice, for we are approaching a joyous and special time: New Year’s Eve, the day that offers you the very best chance of passing out drunkenly and freezing to death in a snowdrift.
The best holiday is Christmas, or the appropriate cultural equivalent. It has fun traditions. It has lots of candy. And you get presents. Christmas is perhaps the only holiday that lives up to the weeks-long anticipatory buildup forced upon us by capitalism. Situated, as it is, at the end of the year, Christmas is a convenient time for us to reflect on what we have done in the past year, and contemplate what we wish to do next. Sitting cozily by the fire with a cup of hot chocolate and a pile of gifts, we absorb good cheer, making it more likely that we will decide to be nice to people in the year to come. I understand that some of you hate your families and therefore despise Christmas – but that’s a personal problem. You can’t blame Santa for that. If you were seeking to design the perfect holiday from scratch, Christmas checks all the boxes.
Then, mere days later, as we’re still basking in the warm afterglow of generosity and peace, New Year’s Eve bursts in like a party guest who arrives after everyone else has left and demands that you turn up the music again. Also, they are throwing up on your floor. After the incredible buildup, release and cool-down of holiday spirit that begins after Thanksgiving and proceeds unabated until the end of the year, the last thing that any of us need is another damn holiday – much less a loud, intoxicated holiday interrupted often by screaming. We have one good holiday in December. That’s plenty. When it comes to holidays – and to proclamations like “I’m taking 20 shots for 2020, wooooo” – more is not always better.
I live in New York City. It’s a lovely town, as long as you take care to avoid a few things: tourists, Times Square and large public gatherings, which are inevitably too crowded to be anything other than miserable. New Year’s Eve manages to combine these three terrors into a single event, and to throw in Kathy Griffin, mounted police and a million drunken people with nowhere to pee for good measure. You almost have to respect this abominable cocktail of doom, in the same way you might respect a jar full of every kind of poison on Earth. From a distance. It is not the sort of thing that you would invite people to.
There is nothing wrong with marking the passage of a year with a quiet ceremony. Go out in the woods and say magic words as the clock strikes midnight, or stay in and whisper your new year’s resolution to your dog. Fine. Yet from coast to coast, the options offered to the public on the last day of the year are mostly bars, clubs and restaurants where prices have tripled. (The tripling of prices in turns triples the determination of patrons to act like monsters, in order to get their money’s worth.)
Alternately, you can go to sleep early, insisting unconvincingly that you are not clinically depressed; you can go to a friend’s party, which everyone will leave at 12:01 in order to go to another, more debauched party; or, if you are a parent, you can stay home arguing with your kids about bedtime until midnight, when they will throw a temper tantrum upon finding out that they do not get presents. This particular holiday has the uncanny ability to make everyone, everywhere, of every age, more of an asshole. And we love it!
Mostly, New Year’s Eve is about getting wasted. Because I do not drink, I find this a boring pretext for a national holiday. Some might say, “Of course you don’t like New Year’s Eve; don’t turn your personal wretchedness into a pathetic pretense of principle, in an attempt to try to bring the rest of the world down to your level of misery.” Let’s not get sidetracked by these arguments. The point is: I’ll be celebrating at home, alone, with a nice glass of seltzer. You’re welcome to stop by. Or not. Go out and have your fun. See if I care.
Tomorrow morning, I will wake up refreshed. And while you are passed out with a hangover, I will steal the money from your pockets. Happy new year. I hope this teaches you a valuable lesson.
Hamilton Nolan is a writer based in New York City
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