Happy New Year! How did you celebrate? For us, New Year’s Eve is a non-holiday. When we were kids, we tried, and sometimes succeeded in staying up to cheer the ball drop and then went straight o bed. From age 18 and into my very early 20’s, we did the whole bar scene. Maryland had raised the drinking age to 21 by the time I was 18 but DC had not so we headed to Georgetown to battle the crowds and pay ridiculous cover charges jst so that we could hot and holler for a couple of minutes at midnight.
Once I became a police officer, I had a whole different perspective on New Year’s Eve. Locking up drunks was my forte early in my career and New Year’s Eve was prime drunk catching time. Once I left patrol, I no longer had any reason to venture out in NYE at all. It didn’t take me long to lose interest in even staying up past 10:00.
So, last night, we didn’t even mention anything to the kids and everyone was sound asleep early.
Growing up, we did have New Year’s Day traditions on my side of the family. We are a mix of Southern American tradition and Greek Cypriot. From my Dad, the southerner, came the belief that you were looking at a year of bad luck if the first person to cross your threshold on New Year’s Day was a woman. My parent’s always invited my mother’s best friend, Jean over and she used to love to be the first one in the house just to torture Dad.
Black eyed peas and cabbage were always served in another southern tradition. You have to eat at least one pea for luck no matter how bad they tasted to a child.
From our Greek side, Mom always served Vasilopita. The person who found the coin hidden in the bread/cake was to have luck all year long. This tradition was always loads of fun as everyone strategized to find the coin.
Although we stopped actually getting together o New Year’s Day several years ago, we will this year. Rather than drag the kids all over creation at Christmas, my family gets together the first weekend after Christmas for dinner and exchanging gifts. That happens to fall on New Year’s Day this year. We are having my mother, brother, his wife and two kids over this evening. Black Eyed peas are on the menu as well as the Vasilopita. I guarantee that my husband will cook way too much food for dinner tonight and breakfast in the morning. I thoroughly love watching my kids play with their cousins and they have been looking forward to it all week. I wish that we all lived closer to each other so that everyone could get together more often.
Now that I have described our family traditions, I ask, what are your traditions? Do you stay up and watch the ball drop? Are there New Year’s Day traditions?
No comments:
Post a Comment