The Most Overrated Night of the Calendar
Sometime around 11 PM on New Year’s Eve, the gap between what you’d hoped the night would be and what it actually is becomes impossible to ignore. The party isn’t quite right. The company is fine but not the right kind of fine. The countdown arrives, you kiss whoever’s nearest, and you think: this is it, this is the moment—and it tastes like cheap sparkling wine and mild disappointment.
I’ve spent New Year’s Eve stuck on public transit at midnight, mid-argument with someone I’d later stop speaking to, at parties I’d have paid to leave, and once, memorably, asleep by ten with a clear conscience and a half-eaten packet of biscuits. That last one might have been the best. The honest record of New Year’s Eves, if you sit down and run through them, is a sequence of demolished expectations—nights driven into the wall by the weight of everything we decided they had to be.
No other night carries this kind of freight. Nobody goes into a Tuesday in March demanding it justify the previous twelve months and pre-authorize the next. But December 31st arrives and suddenly the whole apparatus cranks up: the venue has to be legendary, the company has to be exactly right, the kiss at midnight has to hit some frequency between euphoria and personal revelation, and you have to remember the whole thing warmly for the rest of the year. Which, given that the rest of the year contains actual events, is a lot to ask of one evening. Worse than Christmas, this. At least Christmas just wants you to be politely miserable with your family. New Year’s demands transcendence.
The only New Year’s Eves I can look back on with anything approaching warmth are the ones where I stopped trying—stayed home, or ended up somewhere unexpected, or just let the thing be whatever it was going to be. Which is not a lesson so much as a reminder I apparently need every twelve months, standing somewhere slightly wrong at midnight, wondering why I do this to myself. The answer, obviously, is that I’ll do it again next year.