New Year’s Eve traditions
There are a lot of widely recognized New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day traditions. In the U.S., there are parties and gatherings on New Year’s Eve that culminate in fireworks, balls dropping and lots of noise at the stroke of midnight. People spare no expense for these parties and often get unsecured loans to fund them.
New Year’s Resolutions
Then, New Year’s Day brings lists of New Year’s Resolutions. Americans and some other cultures make all kinds of goals about losing weight and quitting bad habits and then don’t keep them. Seriously, I don’t know anyone who has ever kept a long-term New Year’s Resolution. Unless the resolutions are things like “eat a chicken fried steak” or “visit my mom,” the tradition is to try hard to meet that weight loss, healthy eating, quit smoking, don’t gossip anymore type goal for three to six weeks and then forget why it was important to you on New Year’s Day.
Despite my cynicism about New Year’s Resolutions, I do think that evaluating your life and resolving to make positive changes is an inherently good tradition. However, I’d like to speak on another tradition that comes along with the celebration of the New Year.
Screwing up syntax
One tradition that 99.9 percent of Americans like to observe is screwing up the name of the holiday. New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are very difficult for people to write correctly because they have apostrophes and they are proper nouns. Plus, the desire to use a short phrase that describes both New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day really complicates things.
The celebration of the New Year has been around longer than recorded history. Furthermore, the celebration of the New Year has always encompassed more than one day; in some historic cultures up to 11 days.
Now the celebration of the New Year is traditionally a two-day event, and people commonly refer to those days as “New Years.” Years can only be considered a plural word here because there is no possessive object that follows. Plus, when written, 99.9 percent of the time the apostrophe is left out. So people are wishing each other several years of happiness, which is all fine and good except that there can only be one “new” year at at time. So, it is an American custom to disregard punctuation and definition and simply wish each other “Happy New Years” or ask what someone is doing for New Years. At the risk of destroying a time-honored tradition, I’d like to go on record as encouraging people, especially in writing, to wish a “Happy New Year” and to ask questions like “How are you celebrating the new year?”
