I first wrote the below tirade on New Year's maybe four years ago when I was still a member of Rogue Women Writers. I recycled it in 2019 because it was still true then. I'm recycling it now, with a few edits to be consistent with our current covid times - and, yeah, I still hate the holiday. What do you want? At least I'm consistent.

​Why I hate New Year's

I hate the New Year’s holiday. Always have. Well, not always. When I was a kid, it was the one day in the year when I got to stay up until midnight. I’d eat potato chips with onion dip and watch the stupid ball come down, usually with a babysitter because my parents were usually at a New Year’s party. I envisioned an elegant, fun filled evening of romance – an illusion I kept of New Year’s parties until I hit dating age and the pressure of having a special someone for the holidays – which I rarely did until I met my husband in my late 20s.
 
Now, much older and happily married, I still dislike New Year's. As someone who tends to be a bit on the depressive side, I just get worse around New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. So, at this time of year, with everyone making lists, time to make my list – of ten things I most loathe about this holiday.

1. Television news listing the most significant events of the past year. I know that journalists, like the rest of us, want to take the week off between Christmas and New Year’s, but this is just lazy. And, yeah, yeah, I know all the shit that happened last year, from the January 6 attack on our democracy to the surge of covid when we thought we were out of this but we weren't.  I don’t need to be informed that these were significant events. I’m already aware. Which leads me to:

2. The annual listing of the people who died in the calendar year. Can you spell d-e-p-r-e-s-s-i-n-g? Or morbid? They died. I’m sad. And apart from all the celebrities who died, we lost a load of people to Covid, most of whom will go unheralded - but were very special to their kids, their spouse, their parents.  The years I lost my parents - listening to the sad droning over famous people who had passed just made me sadder.

3. On a lighter note – New Year’s hats. They’re stupid looking. Enough said.  

4. Restaurant dining on New Year’s Eve. I first wrote this in prepandemic times, when people still went out to restaurants. I haven't been to a restaurant  - except to put on two masks, run in and pick up carryout - since last summer when we had the brief illusion that Covid might be over. But even for those souls who do go out to restaurants or who want to wax nostalgic over going out to restaurants in the past, going out on New Years Eve sucks. So, maybe you give in to the idea that you should do something to welcome the fact that you’ll be writing the wrong year on your checks – if you still use checks – for about a month and decide to go out to your favorite restaurant for your favorite meal. Only your favorite restaurant isn’t serving your favorite meal. It’s serving a $200 per person New Year’s Eve special. With Champagne – which is supposed to make up for the fact that your meal is $300 more than you wanted to pay. And you have to drink Champagne –which leads me to...

5. Champagne. It’s expensive. It’s festive. We’re supposed to love it. I don’t. As generally served, it’s a sweet fizzy drink. If I want a drink, I’ll take Scotch. Glen Livet is very festive. If I want sweet, I’ll have a milkshake. But we’re supposed to drink Champagne, because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Kind of circular, but there you are.  

6. The forced gaiety. Again, for me in these covid times, not so much my problem - but in non-covid times, people feel like they should be going to parties to welcome the New Year. And the parties are miserable. The music is ear-shatteringly loud, and people who don’t know how to dance are bumping and grinding into each other. You’re supposed to be dancing along with them, with a brief period of kissing everyone within reach when the clock ticks down to the new year, even though you just want to flee for fresh air. Then there’s the forced gaiety of the people you see crowded into Times Square waiting for the stupid ball to come down as it does every year. Those smiles you see on the faces of people in the crowd on television – they’re either too drunk and stoned to know what’s happening or they figure this will be the last image their loved ones have of them.  Hence the grins to fool the families into thinking their last moments were good ones.  

7. People shooting guns or fireworks at midnight. Usually happens just after I’ve fallen into a deep sleep, having resisted the social pressure to stay up past my usual bedtime. Scares the dogs. Scares me, especially when idiots fire actual bullets into the sky, and yes, people sometimes do fire actual rounds into sky.  Don’t people realize that what goes up….  

8. New Year’s resolutions. No, I don’t make them. Why set myself up for almost certain failure once a year? I do that all the time. Don’t need to make a big thing about it.  

9. The darkness after the holiday. After New Year’s Day, all the decorations come down. The decorated trees, the strings of lights, even the scary Christmas balloons, they all disappear until next year.  It’s the lights, bright colors or even just strings of white lights shining in the dark, that I especially miss. They disappear, and we’re left with the coldest, darkest, and most depressing month of the year. January just goes on and on until it turns into February, the second most depressing month of the year. We could use some festive lights, at least until Valentine’s Day. And some more presents. Make every Friday in January a day to give one present to someone you love. Only not chocolate – I’ll still be fat from not having made a New Year’s resolution to lose the holiday weight. Books make really good January presents.  

10. Finally, let’s get to the essence of the holiday. New Year’s marks just how quickly time goes by and how fleeting our lives really are. This may in fact be the core of my whole shtick about New Year’s – because the holiday just underscores what I already know – “what heart heard of, ghost guessed: it is the blight that man was born for….” We are mortal. Time is short. Yada yada. All the hats and the drinking and the fireworks and the forced gaiety are just trying to conceal that truly terrifying fact. In these Covid times, New Year's marks just how long we've been struggling with this pandemic, and that in 2020, we really thought we had it bear and things would be great.  
 
So, yay, another year gone. Take a deep breath and plunge. May the coming year be, well, at slightly better than the last two.
 

​When I was a child, I wanted a Christmas tree. Back then, there were Jewish families that had what was essentially a Christmas tree, but they labeled it a Hanukkah bush. I tried lobbying for a Hanukkah bush, but my parents weren't buying. I heard the same thing every year.
 
"We're Jewish, and we don't have Christmas trees."
 
Which was a pretty funny stance to take, given that we celebrated Christmas - in a manner of speaking - until I was about eight years old. By Christmas, though, I don't mean the religious holiday. 
 
Christmas is actually several holidays jammed together on the same date - but for convenience's sake, labeled as Christmas. For Christian believers, Christmas is a solemn religious celebration of the birth of their Lord. But there are many who celebrate the day who are not believers - they are celebrating the holiday that I would label - the Celebration of Give-a-Lot-of-Gifts-and-Light-Up- the-Tree. Of course, for many, the two holidays are combined. Santa can move between the camps - designated as St. Nickolas for the religious - or just Santa Claus for those more secularly inclined.
 
For my people, the Jewish people who refuse to celebrate either the solemn religious holiday or the secular Celebration, there is the annual Feast of Chinese Food and a Movie - when - as tradition holds - we romp through empty city streets, enjoying the lack of traffic and the silence.
 
As a side note: I've never been religious, at least not in any traditional sense.
 
When I was a child, we half celebrated Give-a-Lot-of-Gifts-and-Light-Up-the-Tree -- without the light-up-a-tree part  -- because we were Jewish. However, my parents had felt that they had missed out as kids, and they didn't want us to feel left out. Frankly, the holiday consumes almost two months of the year - and it's pretty damn alluring. The lights. The story of magic. So we hung up stockings. We woke up to gifts on Christmas morning brought by Santa Claus. We watched television specials about Christmas, when said television shows featured Santa Claus but not when they featured a lady on a donkey, which I thought had nothing to do with the holiday.  But no tree.
 
At age eight, my sister spilled the beans about Santa, and we stopped the Celebration of Give-a-Lot-of-Gifts - probably because my parents knew about the lady on the donkey and didn't want us to celebrate That holiday. I didn't start celebrating the Jewish annual Feast of Chinese Food and a Movie until I moved to New York. (The Chinese food in New York was much better than the Chinese food in my hometown of Cincinnati.)
 
Fast forward a few years: I met the man who is now my husband. He was handsome, funny, smart, kind - and I could enjoy his Christmas tree because he wasn't Jewish. I like to think the last part isn't the reason I fell in love with him - although that first Celebration of Give-a-Lot-of-Gifts-and-Light-up-the Tree when we decorated his Christmas tree together was pretty enchanting.
 
As a second side note -- my husband has the same level of religiosity as I do -- which is to say, not much.
 
So through our marriage, now towards the end of its third decade, we celebrated everything especially, when our children were younger. Jewish holidays and the not so Jewish holidays - especially the Celebration of Give-a-Lot-of-Gifts-and-Light-up-the Tree. We really did it up. We went to the same Christmas tree market every year where we drank hot cider, fed pet goats, and fought over what would be the perfect tree. We'd decorate the tree to the music of the same album. We baked sugar cookies and watched The Santa Claus. And on Christmas morning, Santa brought copious gifts. (Christmas afternoon, we'd head to the movies - thus honoring both heritages.)
 
So now that my children are grown and thanks to Covid, not spending the holiday with us, I'm doing some re-evaluation. I'm feeling a little more ambivalent about the whole Christmas tree thing. I have gotten more in touch with my Jewish heritage over the last few years, even though I remain agnostic - and that combined with the rise in anti-Semitism has me a little less enthusiastic about the Celebration of Give-a-Lot-of-Gifts-and-Light-up-the Tree. This ambivalence was especially fueled with the rise in people feeling the need to insist that everyone, regardless of belief, say Merry Christmas. Two years ago, I was shopping at Costco in December and the guy checking my cart to see whether I was shoplifting wished me a Merry Christmas. I wished him a Happy Hanukkah back. His response: "Oh. You're one of those."
 
Yes, I am proudly one of those. Just not a religious one.
 
We already celebrated Hanukkah by lighting the menorah. As a Jew, I should be celebrating the Feast of Chinese Food and a Movie on December 25. But, there is still a pandemic, and I'm not comfortable in restaurants or movie theaters. And despite everything, the decorated trees are pretty, the lights alluring, and I am still married to the same wonderful guy who is still not Jewish.
 
So despite my ambivalence, this year we will celebrate a modified Give-a-Lot-of-Gifts-and-Light-up-the-Tree. We won't be able to be with our kids, but we might give each other a gift or two. The tree is maybe a foot high and made of pink pipe cleaners. But we will be celebrating whatever it is - together.
 
Happy whatever you celebrate.