Why Happy New Year?

You said it last year, you’ll say it again … probably

31 December 2023 ~ Why Happy New Year?

Hardly a year goes by without somebody saying, and I believe that I have said it myself, “Thank God that 1987, 1999, 2020 (whatever the year) is over. It’s been an awful year for me. Let’s hope that the next one will be better.” So off we go to the New Year’s party, drink copiously, leap around, get wildly and uncontrollably drunk ~ don’t you! ~ pop the champagne corks, countdown the minutes to 12 and on the strike of midnight shout ‘Hooray and Happy New Year’. In short, we do everything we are supposed to do. We play it by tradition.

Come the next morning, nothing has changed. It’s just as grey, cold and wet outside as it was the day before. The holidays are over, and in a day’s time it will be back to the treadmill of work. The New Year stretches before us, not the Yellow Brick Road of the night before but a long, bumpy, uneven track seemingly heading nowhere. And to add to the disconsolation, there’s also the terrible hangover.

Nihilistic, is that what you say? Or perhaps, what a miserable bugger!

Let’s roll back the decades and take a look at the event-grabbing headlines that defined the ‘Happy New Years’ of those specific years.

Happy New Year: 2014
1. Global Bola epidemic
2. Malaysian airline disaster
3. Rise of the terror group ISIS
4. Black Riots in America

Happy New Year: 2002
1. Mount Nyiragongo erupts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
2. President George Bush delivers his ‘Axis of Evil’ speech
3. Two Snipers in Washington DC kill and injure people
4. Terrorists detonate bombs in two nightclubs in Kuta, Bali, killing more than 200 people

Happy New Year: 1992
1. Black riots in Los Angeles
2. Pro-abortion demonstrations in Washington
3. Major earthquake in Turkey
4. First McDonalds in China

Happy New Year: 1982
1. Argentina invades the Falkland Islands
2. Tylenol capsules impregnated with potassium cyanide kill 7 people in Chicago
3. Genetic Engineering is used commercially for the first time
4. IRA bombing campaign in London

Happy New Year: 1972
1. Watergate {death by boredom}
2. The Munich Olympics Massacre by Palestinian terrorists
3. Northern Ireland, the Bogside Massacre
4. Vietnam War drags on

Of course, newsworthy calamities such as those listed above pertain to world events. On the scale of our own lives, we have to back-peddle somewhat to bring together the recollections of all that was said and done over the months preceding the New Year bash.

Happy New Year from a rather strange potato

Now there’s an exercise for you. If you don’t keep a diary, and you jolly well should, grab a pen and a piece of paper and jot down a list of events and incidents that define in your opinion the past 12 months of your life. When done, back-track through the list and mark the incidents and events that gave and brought you happiness with a smiley-faced emoji and those that caused you harm or grief with, if you happen to have one handy, a two-fingered ‘V’ sign. Next, just tot them up and compare the ‘Happy’ to ‘F..K Off!’ score to determine what sort of year you have had and the quality of life you are having. At the end of this simple exercise, hopefully but most unlikely, you should be able to say, “What a stonking good year that was. If 2024 is anything like its predecessor, my life going forward is right on track”. Have you been able to say this? Welcome to the minority.

You could say, if you belonged to a certain generation, that ‘it’s being so cheerful that keeps me going’ and that’s why my New Year’s resolution for 2024 is going to be ‘Smile though your heart is breaking’. I’ll let you know how my new business venture, ‘Rent a Life & Soul of the Party’ is doing 12 months from now, if I’m still doing time here on Earth.

Meanwhile, enjoy yourselves, and I hope you’ll be able to say this time next year that 2024 was the best year of my life. (snigger).

Happy New Year!