The Columnist Manifesto

I’ve spent three recent New Year’s Eves with my friends P and T in various parts of California. It’s usually a quiet dinner, champagne and some sort of word game, like Boggle. I find New Year’s Eve to be a manipulative holiday; I’ve never been one for forced jollity, I resent the stupendous markup on restaurant and “night-spot” prices, I’m still pissed off about those years on which I didn’t have a date, and I generally don’t like being part of a crowd. Sounds like a night made for me, huh?

This year, T makes the following observation:

New Year’s should be in the fall, at harvest time, like the Jewish New Year. Or it should be in the Spring, to mark the renewal of nature. But January? It’s a completely arbitrary part of the dead of winter, dictated only by the happenstance of the Julian calendar.

We all agree that T’s point is pretty much unassailable, and there's nothing for it but to go off to our respective beds. It’s 10:30.