Midnight, However It Happens
By four o’clock on December 31st the supermarket is hostile territory and everyone you know is in a group chat that hasn’t resolved anything. The plan exists in a state of quantum uncertainty: simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, collapsing only under the force of midnight itself.
I asked three bloggers where they were ending up. Oliver Jopke, who writes Zeitgeschmack in Berlin, cut straight to it: he hates New Year’s Eve. He usually spends the 31st at home with friends—DVDs, alcohol, no ceremony—and then goes to Berghain on January 1st, which is technically not New Year’s Eve at all, just the morning after. He’s philosophical about sharing the dance floor with every tourist who’s seen a documentary about Berlin nightlife and decided this was their year to try it: my friends are there, so it becomes bearable.
If he could reschedule the holiday, he’d move it to February 29th in a leap year. Once every four years seems about proportionate.
Jessica Weiß at Journelles went to Rio the previous year and has the cautionary tale. The idea of it: everyone in white, small boats carrying flowers out into the ocean, fireworks over Copacabana. The reality: rain all night, no fireworks visible, white dresses buried under red plastic ponchos, and a near-crush at a David Guetta concert. This year she told all her friends to meet at the Michelberger Hotel and didn’t add further instructions—whoever shows up is the party. For the more ambitious she recommends the Austrian mountains, where you apparently start drinking at après-ski and end the night sledding down a run at midnight. Her resolutions, she admits freely, are the same ones every year and she forgets them by morning.
Angela Nguyen at La Festival is the anomaly: she actually likes New Year’s Eve. Heading to Hamburg with her boyfriend, genuinely enthusiastic. Her worst memories are the years spent at home with family—sitting around waiting for midnight, playing with a few fireworks, then going to sleep
—which honestly sounds peaceful in a particular key. She makes resolutions all year, discards them, invents new ones. She knows this is circular. She does it anyway.
What I take from all three is that the night almost always fails the expectation and people find a way to be fine with that. Oliver preempts it by opting out of the ceremony entirely. Jessica watched the postcard version get rained on and made peace with it. Angela just decides she loves it, which is its own kind of defiant act. The countdown happens either way. What varies is what you decide it means.