THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 1, 1995 TAG: 9412290165
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 03 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Coastwise
SOURCE: Ford Reid
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
Maybe it is because it comes so close to Christmas, but New Year's Day has always seemed to me a strange sort of second-rate holiday.
On Christmas, you get up early, open presents, eat a huge breakfast, nap for awhile, play with your gifts, listen to some wonderful music, eat another huge meal, admire again all of the neat toys and then reflect on the day.
Christmas is joy from one end to the other.
New Year's? It doesn't even have its own music, except of course for the Bobby Burns poem ``Auld Lang Syne'' put to music, which is really a New Year's Eve song.
The day denotes an arbitrary division of time.
One year ends and another begins and why?
Because the calendar says so, that's why.
A better day for celebrating a new year would be, I think, the winter solstice.
That day marks the end of the ever-shorter, dying days of the old year and the promise of longer days to come.
Now, that is something that you can celebrate with enthusiasm, a day that really marks a change.
But we are stuck, I suppose, with January 1 as the beginning of our new year.
Governments would have to get involved in changing it and you know what that would mean. Things would only get worse.
This year, of course, the salvation of New Year's Day, the college football bowl games, are mostly delayed until January 2.
You will have to wait until 1995 is well under way to find out which two or three teams claim to be the best in the land.
New Year's resolutions are a grand old tradition, even if hardly anyone keeps them. Many of them, I think, are the direct and inevitable result of New Year's Eve.
All over the world this morning people are saying ``I'll swear, I'm never going to do that again.
It is probably a banner day for the makers of aspirin, Alka Seltzer and the various hangover remedies. Tomato juice sales must skyrocket on Jan. 1.
One of my favorite things about the season is the annual predictions of psychics and seers.
They see troubles for celebrities, as if just being a celebrity wasn't trouble enough. They see calamity for politicians, as if just being a politician isn't calamity enough.
They see great storms and natural disasters. Name me a year in which there were no great storms or natural disasters.
But these people who predict the future do us all a great favor. Nothing beats starting the year with a good laugh.
The worst thing about New Year's Day is that it is really the last holiday of the old year, not the first of the new.
For most people, the next paid day off will not come until Memorial Day, a full five months from now.
If you can celebrate that, then you and New Year's Day deserve each other. by CNB