STAYING IN. This year will be like every year. I’ll be in my hometown. It will have snowed. My large family will gather at my cousin’s house, on Main Street. We’ll sit around, eating casseroles off of paper plates. The kids will be hanging out in the other room, watching “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.” At some point, my Aunt Millie will pass through the room and say, “My Lord, a person can’t hear herself think!” We’ll play charades. It will start as Bible charades but sometime during the first round, we’ll realize that we only know the movie version of the Bible so we’ll switch to movie charades. By around 11, we’ll start glancing at our watches, wondering if we can stick it out. We’ll go into the other room with the kids. Someone will see Britney Spears on television and say “My word, look at her abdomen!” By midnight, the crowd will have thinned to a handful, and everyone will be yawning. At midnight, we’ll give a tepid hurrah, grab our coats and bundle up for the walk home. I’ll ring in the new year standing in the snow in the middle of Main Street, privately toasting my little world and carrying an empty casserole dish.
— Amy Dickinson
Janis Kief, Chicago: “I will be at home with my daughter Stephanie. We live above a restaurant called Pasha and every year we watch Dick Clark and then we open the window at midnight and throw balloons, confetti and poppers on to the street. The balloons have coins or trinkets or something in them, so when they pop, people can have a treat. We do the shakers and wish `Happy New Year’ to people going into Pasha or walking by because it’s a highly populated area. The people at Pasha know we do this and some of the guests come out and celebrate with us. So for us, I guess this is our tradition.” Should you wish to (shudder!) go out, Pasha Restaurant and Club, 642 N. Clark St., features a gourmet buffet dinner seating from 7-11 p.m., and open bar before 7 p.m. and after 11 p.m. The cost is $100, reservations required. The club will be open to the public after 11 p.m. with a DJ and dancing. The party-only cost is $20; 312-397-0100. And say hello to Janis!
David Adelsperger, Schaumburg: “When you have two kids, you like spending time with them. My son (7 years old), he’ll stay up as long as you let him. I think I’ll just hang out with the family, maybe open a little champagne, pretty much what we usually do. Before the kids we would go to a party or go to a ball or something else, but with kids you just want to spend time with them.”
My annual New Year’s Eve party owes its existence to a pigheaded restaurant manager.
Some years ago my friends proposed going out for dinner, followed by movies and merrymaking at their house. The catch: Dinner would be at 6 p.m., to accommodate a friend who was working that night. But the selected restaurant, which most of us had visited weekly in the past year, hadn’t planned to start serving dinner until 6:30 and, amazingly, refused to seat a party of 16 at 6 p.m. despite our promise to relinquish the table by 7:30.
I quickly suggested a potluck dinner at my place. Every couple brought one course and two bottles of wine. The women still wanted to dress up, so we agreed to a coat-and-tie rule for the men. We dined, wined, watched a movie, took snapshots and rang in the New Year–our sons and their friends (pizza and Coke in the basement) were happy to shower us with confetti at the stroke of midnight. (I didn’t even need to hire a baby-sitter.)
We’ve done the same thing every New Year’s Eve since.
— Phil Vettel
Having had a birthday fall on New Year’s Eve for some 40-plus years, I’ve experienced the gamut of celebratory possibilities: playing Monopoly, Mouse Trap and Hands Down until well after midnight at home in Des Plaines as a kid with Mom, Dad and my two older siblings; heartily pulling all-nighters as a young adult sipping champagne on a warm Florida night with gal pals; slugging Jack Daniel’s cocktails under the stars of a crisp Georgia evening with a special someone; spending big bucks on a B.B. King concert in Chicago after dinner at Scoozi with my then-husband-to-be; watching the millennium ring in on TV from bed as a frazzled fortysomething with a head cold with a nursing infant daughter.
This birthday holiday, however, will be unlike any other, and I’m looking forward to it like none before. It will be my first as a newly divorced single mom.
To mark this occasion, I decided the first thing to do is to let my nearly 5-year-old stay up past midnight. The second is to be with someone who has been living my situation for awhile–a friend and single mom. So we’re planning a special night with our girls. We’ll do some kind of craft, eat special treats, watch the ball drop on TV at midnight, perhaps look out the back door at the starlit sky–and ponder a fresh start on the new year ahead, and all its wonderful possibilities.
— Heather M. Lajewski
Much as I might be tempted to take a night off from music to welcome in the new year, the prospect of hearing one of my favorite operatic divas, soprano Renee Fleming, from the safety of my living room on New Year’s Eve is just too tantalizing to pass up.
So my partner and I will be breaking out the sparkling grape juice (hey, champagne gives us both headaches) beginning at 7 p.m. when WTTW-Ch. 11 presents “Live from Lincoln Center, the New York Philharmonic’s New Year’s Eve Concert.” Fleming is scheduled to sing arias by Massenet, including one from “Thais,” which she performed last season at Lyric Opera. Lyric Opera’s own Andrew Davis will conduct other French favorites by Offenbach, Debussy and Ravel in the two-hour telecast. This promises to be the next best thing to hearing Fleming sing at the Lyric. It’s also a civilized excuse to stay indoors on a night when the weather and the drunken revelers outside can be frightful.
— John von Rhein
I have a view of Navy Pier from my apartment, so what I like to do is sit in the living room and watch fireworks going off at midnight while playing the simulcast on television, either on WFLD-Ch. 32 or WLS-Ch. 7. Watching the explosions over the lakefront, which usually lasts about 10 or 15 minutes, gives me the opportunity to reflect on both the events of the previous year and the anticipation of the coming year.
These ruminations, combined with the pretty lights of the display, are calming. And for some reason, fireworks igniting in the cold air look more crisp than they do on a sultry summer night.
— Allan Johnson
When in college, I began what became a habit of attending a movie that started before midnight and took me (plus friends or a date) well past it. The intent was to avoid revelers at the Big Moment, and for decades the strategy has worked well. Laser discs and, more recently, DVDs meant the choice of entertainment became wider and the mob was kept even further away. There’s nothing like being in the middle of an opera, concert or film and hearing, faintly, merrymakers outside. This year will be no exception.
— Alan G. Artner
Our New Year’s Eve tradition is to travel across the street to the home of friends where we gather with several families from our parish, St. Gertrude, in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood. There’s a nice meal and good conversation, and around 11 p.m., we–the adults and many of the kids–begin to play the dictionary game. It starts with someone taking up the thick unabridged dictionary and selecting an obscure word. Players are told the spelling of the word and have to come up with a believable definition. The person who selected the word also writes down the actual definition. When the definitions are read, everyone votes on which is the right one. If one of the false definitions wins, that player gets to pick the next word. If not, the original player selects again. Usually, we’re playing this when midnight comes and goes unnoticed.
— Patrick T. Reardon
Being a no-kids couple (not counting the cat, who is just the cutest thing and does the funniest stuff, like throwing up on the rug or taking a chunk out of my leg unless she gets her daily ration of cheese!), for years we merrily spent New Year’s Eves sitting for various nieces and nephews, thus springing their parents for a rare night out.
But the kids have gotten older and their parents won’t pay us despite having more disposable income than Congress, so now we just stay home, order pizza, warm up the TV, curl up on the couch, punch the cat and wait for Dick Clark’s makeup to crack before we harmlessly doze off right there, at which point the cat pounces on the cold pizza and, later, takes a chunk out of my leg and celebrates the New Year by throwing up on the rug.
— Alan Solomon
