Family, Gatherings, holidays, Uncategorized

New Year

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Our day and evening will be spent with our busy 2 year old grandson and his parents. We typically don’t whoop it up much for New Year’s. We will cook a nice dinner and probably go to bed early.

My mother spent New Year’s Eve of 1944 in New York City with cousins who grew up in Manhattan.  They took her to the Stork Club. We have a photo somewhere of her in a fancy hat holding a glass of champagne. The only thing she ever said about it was that she didn’t like it when everyone started kissing each other at midnight. I wish I had asked her more about the club and her experiences in New York.

What will today and this evening be like for you? Any memorable New Year’s Eves for you or your family?

48 thoughts on “New Year”

  1. spent a bunch of new years eves in disney world when kids were small. we used to pack 3 or 4 bottles of champagne in the stroller to enjoy when the clock struck
    2000 was memorable. remember when no one was sure if computers would acknowledge new millennium? disney had generators parked everywhere in anticipation of the worst possible. hope for the best prepare for the worst… 2021 here we come

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  2. My most memorable New Years was decades ago while on a Mediterranean cruise. Things were going well. The music was fine. My table companions were a pleasant group except for a loud- mouthed clergyman. Definitely NOT a Lutheran. Just after midnight the ship encountered a large wave and…

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        1. A couple of weeks ago I asked my friend, Philip, who is a retired Russian Orthodox priest, what he believes comes after death. He replied that the more he thinks about it, he realizes that he doesn’t know. He doesn’t believe in hell or purgatory, he said, but if the Evangelicals are all going to heaven, he doesn’t want to go there. Doesn’t want to spend eternity with that bunch. I think Philip and I are headed for the same place, wherever that is. Let the mystery be.

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  4. I am not a big New Year’s fan. Partly because I’ve never been good at staying up late. Never. The one that I did purposely stay up for was Y2K. I got caught up in the fascination of watching as the new year started on the other side of the planet and worked its way toward us and nothing happened. Two years of Y2K insanity and nothing happened. Nothing.

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    1. The “nothing” of Y2K was just one more disappointment for me, not that I wanted the world to end. Comet Hale-Bopp was a big dud, just like Geraldo Rivera’s opening of Al Capone’s safe. Let’s hope the mass vaccination they keep promising isn’t another.

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  5. Like VS, we’re not partiers on NYE. ALways stay home and drink Champagne, eat tasty appetizers, and watch “Casablanca” and “Young Frankenstein.” My wife calls it a moral victory if she stays awake until 11 pm to see the ball drop at Times Square.

    Happy New Year to this wonderfully eclectic bunch of intelligent primates! Stay positive, test negative, and have a 2021 that more than makes up for the crappy 2020.

    Chris in Owatonna

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  6. Rise and Shine Baboons,

    The best New Year’s Eve party I ever attended was in my grad school days when none of the attendees had much of anything. As in, not even much furniture. We gathered at a nearly empty married student apartment on the St. Paul Campus, where we sat on packing boxes, ate, drank, and made merry. We engaged in the best game of Charades that I ever encountered. All the attendees appeared to be riding the same psychic wave, guessing names of books, films and songs from the most basic clues:

    “The Feminine Mystique”
    “The Magnificent Obsession”
    “Does your Chewing Gum Get Hard on the Bedpost Overnight?”
    “Of Mice and Men”
    A Tracy/Hepburn film name that escapes me right now.
    D_I_V_O_R_C_E

    And on and on we went late into the night.

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    1. Forgot part of it. We are watching Netflix tonight. We have the final episodes of “The Crown”, “The Queen’s Gambit”, and all of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom to watch. I have been hoarding the final episodes for New Year’s Eve—it is all we have this year.

      COVID in AZ is once again out-of-control here. Their numbers, both of cases and deaths, are running 2-3 times that in Minnesota. ICU beds are full. When the MN Governor closed restaurants and bars after 9pm, I thought it might be an efficient use of his powers. Bars here are wide open. We hear there were many large family gatherings at Thanksgiving and Christmas in AZ. I suspect bars and holidays contributed to these conditions, so we will be staying home.

      I mentioned before thatLou has encountered a strange after effect of COVID. He suffered a significant hearing loss that his ENT documented before we left MN. Yesterday his Eustachian tubes closed entirely and he was stone deaf. Thankfully, today he awoke and his hearing had returned. Who Knew?

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  7. Our last several New Years have been pretty quiet. Just us at home. We probably watch the ball drop a couple times. May or may not fall asleep on the couch before then.

    When we were younger, there was some pretty good parties at the theaters that were a lot of fun. And then there was a few years we were invited to a private party of a Doctor. He had a bartender and *quite* the spread of food. Including beef tongue. I thought I was pretty hot stuff when I was invited to those after I became a member of the theater Board of Directors. Would have been in my early twenties.
    That fact it was just about a block from Kelly’s apartment helped because we could go there for the party, stumble back to her apartment and collapse.
    I think I was still expected home for chores in the morning though.

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  8. New Year’s Eve has never been much of an event for me. Being an NICU hospital nurse, I was required to work every other one. Several times I volunteered to work it extra (holiday pay don’t ya know) We brought small plastic wine glasses, filled them with sparkling juice, carried them on a tray to all those working on the unit. Just before midnight, the unit secretary would come over the intercom and count down to the New Year. We would lift our glasses in a toast, chug the juice, and return to work. A couple of times we threw confetti, too, but it was a pain to clean up so that practice ended quickly. Many of us wore party hats for at least part of the shift.

    Happy New Year to all the baboons. I would add to Chris in O’s last sentence….. and get vaccinated!

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        1. Adding to the “what next?” quality of 2020, there is a news story of a pharmacy employee in Wisconsin who deliberately destroyed numerous doses of vaccine.

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        2. Whether Philip believes in it or not, I hope that sob goes to hell. I can’t even begin to think of what kind of miserable person you’d have to be to do something like that. Over five hundred doses of a precious resources squandered because of his deliberate action. May he be miserable for the rest of his life, wherever he spends it.

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  9. Jacque’s recollection of her graduate student New Year’s Eve celebration brought to mind a couple of our early New Year’s parties. The first one after we were married was spent with a bunch of his woodworker friends who lived in a small house in South Minneapolis somewhere.

    I remember wearing a beautiful (and expensive) silk blouse, dressed down with a pair a blue jeans, as I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. As it turned out, I was vastly overdressed; thank god for the blue jeans. The party was pot-luck, of course, and this being a furniture makers house, the buffet was an ironing board. There were several musicians in the group, so it was a decent party once everyone started singing, but it was admittedly more “rustic” than any party I had ever attended on a New Year’s Eve before.

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  10. For many years we spent New Year’s Eve with our good friends Jon and Linda K. They’d arrive for a late dinner, the first many years at 8 PM, then later on at 9 PM, in order for us to still be awake at midnight.

    The menu was always the same: appetizer of some sort (Linda would bring whatever struck her fancy), grilled shrimp in a garlicky butter sauce with a baked artichoke/rice side dish. Creme brulee for dessert. Easy, tasty, and allowed us maximum time at the table, just chatting. Jon has been gone over a year now, and none of us see well enough to drive confidently at night, so we’ll celebrate by ourselves.

    Tonight’s menu: Gravlax timbale on freshly baked pumpernickel, French onion soup, mini savory artichoke cheesecake, jumble cheese, and parmesan pesto twists. The last three items delivered fresh yesterday by Mellissa who is an expert at concocting delicious noshes. We still have fruitcake, cookies, fudge and truffles left if we want something sweet at the end, though, to be honest, I doubt there will be much call for that tonight. It’ll be a quiet evening, not much different than most, but I’m looking forward to being done with 2020. We’ll toast the New Year with the bottle of chilled Cava we have on hand. Happy New Year, all, may the new year bring happier days to the trail and beyond.

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  11. Early this evening we’ll gather on the Wagon Bridge, Latsch Island with a few friends for full moonrise, if it ever clears (was supposed to be sunny here today, so far not). Debi is bringing her Bluetooth speaker and we may dance a bit in boots and parkas…

    Then we’ll check out something on Netflix, “Death to 2020” which is billed as a dark comedy – a little over an hour. I have a few other movies in mind to back that up. Or we could play some Mexican Train… We certainly won’t last till midnight, and may toast before bedtime with a new recipe Husband is making called Double Cheesecake.

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  13. I apologize. I’ve never had a New Years Eve cruise. But this lie had a great outcome courtesy of Steve and PHC.
    Meanwhile I am celebrating New Years as my family have done for years: Twilight Zone marathon. My kids are now in New York. Should have set it up on Zoom. We await our favorite episode, It’s A Good Life.

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  14. Spent today grocery shopping with son, and cooked. Now we have a tortiere. Son is making a pasta with seafood. We are eating in waves, and have a Spanish Champagne for the very last.

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  15. I am having a salmon fillet, potatoes, and baked beans for dinner with a nice pinot noir. Watching an episode of Young Sheldon. Then a jigsaw puzzle and some Christmas music.

    Tomorrow I’ll fix a bean dish in the crockpot, a variation on the theme of hoppin’ john. Looking forward to a national reset in 2021…surely it can’t get worse; things will be better in the New Year.

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    2. I hope the hell you haven’t jinxed us all by stating that “surely it can’t get worse.” Sounds like a wonderful dinner.

      I’d be interested in a scoop of your bean dish for Philip if you’d care to share. He can’t have his New Year’s Day party this year, and he’s mourning the loss of it. He always served Hoppin’ John.

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      1. The bean dish is actually a means of using up some expired canned goods. I routinely eat stuff that’s expired, but I don’t feed others with it. It won’t be real hoppin’ john anyway, no black-eyed peas, just cannellini beans.

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  16. Most of my New Year’s Eves have been quiet. My husband and I DID have a New Year’s Party, two years ago. There was lots of food, from all of us, and little or no drinking. We had a very nice time with our friends and they all went home after the ball dropped.

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