The Worst Holiday: New Year’s Eve Is Overhyped and Anticlimactic
On Christmas, gifts are exchanged, carols sung, and peace and goodwill extended toward all humankind. Done right, Thanksgiving includes a Turducken, traditional sides, and pie. The Fourth of July ends with choreographed bursts of pyrotechnic delight exploding in the warm summer sky. Whereas here in America, New Year’s Eve is a too expensive exercise in affected frenzy and anticlimax. How fitting that the Y2K scare fizzled on the biggest New Year’s Eve of our lives, a night that Prince had been singing about for 17 years. Did your night live up to the hype?
On December 31, mediocre restaurants throughout America string absurd velvet ropes outside their doors, inflate black and white balloons as decoration, and charge three times the usual price for the same old fare plus bad champagne. Is it any wonder that our elders, as they grow older and wiser, opt to stay home and turn in before midnight? America’s most iconic New Year’s Eve celebration, the one that captures the attention of the whole country, has massive crowds gathering in New York City’s most garish neighborhood, where they watch a as C-list celebrities narrate on TV. The typical NYC dweller can’t be lured to Times Square for dinner on an ordinary evening, so I can’t imagine how pre-New Year’s conversations go for those who attend. “Would you like to stand out in the freezing cold for hours with no place to sit or use the bathroom and drunks pressed against you on all sides?”
