New Year's Eve 2015

Before All of This Started...

When you blog about your life every single day, it cuts down on the need to publish year-end retrospectives. People who visit this space fairly regularly pretty much know what I think about the events of 2015, from the important to the relatively trivial.

This incarnation of the blog didn't begin until May 19 of this year, though, and so there were a few things about the year that didn't make it into the blog, such as...

Saying "goodbye" to the wonderful staff and students at Thomas Jefferson High School...

...my best friend undergoing spinal surgery...

...the final episode of Justified airing on April 14...

...and the final episode of Mad Men airing on May 17, just a couple of days before this blog debuted.






There were obviously highlights as well as lowlights this year...but those mostly came after the blog began (coincidence?)...you can read about those just by browsing through the Blog Archive in the right-hand sidebar...

"And I was right there with you every step of the way."

I'm not sure whether to list that as a highlight or a lowlight...

Traditions

I fully expect to carry out almost all of the New Year's Eve traditions my mom taught me, including...

...having money in my pocket when the clock strikes midnight...

...having a nice alcoholic beverage to sip...

...and welcoming in the New Year by opening an outside door and lighting the way with a candle.














One of mom's traditions I won't be indulging in...

I actually like sardines, I just don't want to eat a whole tin of them by myself, and throwing away food is a sin, so...sorry, mom.

A few years ago in Atlantic, I added a new tradition of my own...actually going outside at midnight in my bare feet...

...regardless of the weather. It helps if you've been drinking leading up to midnight...

One Day You'll Understand, Kid

From the delightful comic strip Zits, by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman, which you should read every day, as I do.

Until Next Year...

In 1788 the Scottish poet Robert Burns published the poem "Auld Lang Syne," which according to Burns himself contained words he transcribed from other sources. Not long after, Burns's poem was paired with a traditional Scottish folk song, and it became traditional to sing the piece at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. The tradition spread throughout Great Britain, and so of course it came with those Scots, Irish, Welsh, and English immigrants to the New World.

Robert Burns, by Alexander Nasmyth

One of my earliest memories of childhood is the first time my older brother and I were allowed to stay up until midnight on New Year's Eve. My parents had the TV on, and it was then I learned about the dropping of that silly ball in Times Square.

Not much of it made any sense to me, as a kid, but I could tell that my parents thought it was a Big Deal, so of course that made it one for me, too. The song they played once the ball dropped was "Auld Lang Syne," of course.



Today's send-off is a charming version of the song by a true Scot, singer-songwriter-instrumentalist Dougie MacLean, from his 1995 album Tribute. It is paired with some gorgeous images of Burns's and MacLean's native Scotland. Enjoy...