I’ve discovered that New Year’s should start on January 2nd.
Calling January 1st the New Year is really kind of unpleasant considering how terrible everyone feels after a night of partying. December 31st up until January 2nd is really a time of limbo, a strange alcohol-fuelled period between the two years, where the entire world parties and then wakes up the next morning with a collective hangover. All holiday season, people talk about the coming year like it will be something different, that it will be hopeful and wonderful, and make all kinds of crazy resolutions and personal challenges, but by 11Am on the first I wonder if more than a fraction of those people are even functional as human beings.
No one remembers December 31st or the early hours of January 1st. Worst yet, no one wants to remember the dehydration headaches that follow for the rest of the day until you inevitably pass out around 8:30pm from exhaustion and unhappiness over your stupid decisions of the night before and that one last shot of Vodka that no one really wanted to do but you made everyone do just the same.
I think people could be a lot more hopeful if they knew that the New Year really only started on January second, when sobriety comes back to say hello and the Tylenol has worked its magic. Giving up 2 days to the time between times, to the the wild other, sounds like a fair price for being able to start the Year, the real Year, off on the road foot, even if it is a day late.