Celebrating the New Year in America

For as long as I can remember, New Year's Day was about college football, which of course left us non-football watching people pretty much in the dust. If we were lucky, we'd have to sleep off a hangover, but otherwise, it was a desert of football, football, and more football.

Mr. Brilliant used to say that the Grateful Dead took over for Guy Lombardo when the latter died, and indeed for a few years, the annual radio broadcast from wherever the Dead where playing that particular New Year's Eve, was as ritual as Lombardo ever was.

In recent years, though, New Year's seems to have become a quieter affair, at least in my circles, which are admittedly not getting any younger and are less inclined to party till the wee hours, lest we lose the entire next day. But some of it is also realizing that such barometers of the passage of time simply serve to remind us how much closer we are getting to Taking the Big Dirt Nap, and how much more frequently the evening of December 31 seems to come around these days. Oh, the trappings of gaiety are still there. The Newport News catalog still comes around with its assortment of really ongepotchket party dresses, and the local catering halls still advertise their big New Year's Eve bashes, the charms of which have always escaped me. Who wants to pay $150 a head to spend New Year's Eve with 300 people you don't know, at what is essentially a big catered wedding with paper party hats and noisemakers substituting for a bride, right down to the mediocre food, cheap champagne toast, and really bad DJ.

Perhaps the worst part of the whole New Year ritual is the self-flagellation of the New Year's Resolution. This is often spun as the result of self-reflection and a desire to be a better person, but it all too often takes the form of "I Will Lose 20 Pounds", which makes January the equivalent for the diet industry and fitness clubs what December used to be to retailers, until the Republicans wrecked the economy after deciding that a thriving middle class really wasn't necessary and was simply getting in the way of the "deserving" rich amassing yet more and more cash. This year's poster child for the weight loss resolution is, of course, Oprah Winfrey, a highly accomplished and intelligent woman who after gaining weight yet again, hasn't realized yet that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. For a sane perspective on Winfrey's perpetual public battle with her avoirdupois (which I think she should abandon because frankly, she looks BETTER when she's heavier), you can't do better than Kate's open letter to Oprah.

So from where I'm sitting, New Year's Eve is this grim affair, fraught with either relief that a bad year is over, depression at the notion that everyone else on the face of the earth is wearing a fabulous dress at a fabulous party filled with fabulous people. But when even the fabulous ModFab is celebrating at home, you have to wonder if the whole New Year's Eve thing, like everything else in America, is really about commerce and not much else.

I actually think the New Year's Day party is a better idea, because it has a fresh, new feel, like a fluffy bathrobe that hasn't yet started to pill after too many washings, instead of the slumping gait of a party guest who has stayed too long and passed out with his face in what's left of the salmon mousse. Because on New Year's Day, what one wants to do is eat and watch TV, so why not invite some people over?

But even if you're not feeling particularly social, there's no question that New Year's Day warrants a real breakfast at a real Jersey diner, so we headed off bright and early at 8 AM to our local version of that New Jersey institution. Diners have been enjoying a renaissance here, despite the demise of the Forum, which had the best cheesecake in the known universe. The landscape on NJ highways these days is dotted with bright, shiny, new ersatz railroad car-style diners, but when you just want breakfast, the tired charmlessness of the local eatery will do just fine, and ours is about as charmless a jernt as you're likely to find. Our local diner hasn't been updated since perhaps 1967, the menus are falling apart, and you wouldn't want to order an actual dinner there. But for a corned beef sandwich or a feta and spinach omelette, it'll do just fine. And for some reason, an omelette just tastes so much better on New Year's Day.

But what struck me this year more than anything else is that the new tradition for New Year's is the television marathon. If you have 1,457 channels of nothing to watch the way we do, there were endless choices -- the Honeymooners marathon in WPIX. The Mythbusters marathon on Discovery. The Twilight Zone marathon on Sci-fi. The Clean House marathon on Style. The Renovation Realities marathon on HGTV. And our personal choice, the Looney Tunes marathon on Nickolodeon.

I'm quite certain that college students today don't have Marx Bros. movies and Warner Bros. cartoons as mandatory rights of passage for membership in the Trash Culture Mutants club, but for us old codgers, you couldn't be really cool unless you collapsed into giggles at two words spoken exactly right: "...TA HAVE!!"

Nickelodeon has an astonishing library of remastered classics, and they've re-engineered them back to their widescreen origins, so for the entire day yesterday, we were treated to nearly back-to-back cartoons, many of them not often seen. I'd forgotten how warped your sense of reality gets after a few hours of Termite Terrace zaniness. But warped it is, and as I head back to work today, well, I'm now in the proper frame of mind to face the new year.