Ever since I was a kid, New Year's Eve/Day have been my least favorite holidays. How can the best holiday of the year be followed a week later by the worst?
New Year's Day historically means only one thing to me: An entire day of sitting around watching football, just like Thanksgiving and somewhat like Christmas has become. While the NFL has capitalized on Thanksgiving and Christmas, New Year's belongs to the sponsors of college bowl games. The other night I watched part of the Meineke Car Care Bowl. Can you imagine the excitement of the two teams when they found out which bowl game they'd go to? "Whoopee!!! We got invited to the Meineke Care Care Bowl!" I suppose the title of the bowl game doesn't matter -- the teams just want to get to one. (However I won't get started on the fact that half the Division I college football teams go to a bowl game now. The University of Colorado Buffaloes, who finished the season with a 6-6 record, went to the Independence Bowl, which, by the way, they lost Sunday night.)
They still have the old-fashioned bowl games, like the Rose Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Orange Bowl etc., but they are known first by their sponsor names, like the FedEx Orange Bowl and the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. Get your chips and salsa ready for that one. I'm still waiting for the creation of the Oxy Clean Toilet Bowl and the Kellogg's Cereal Bowl. Or how about the Panda Express Rice Bowl?
When I was younger New Year's Eve, at least, was a bigger deal. My parents used to host a party, where they and their friends would gather to eat shrimp. drink and play board games. When I was a teenager, my friends and I attempted a progressive dinner on New Year's Eve, but we didn't get past the appetizers because every restaurant in town was so crowded, we gave up on going to a different place for each course.
This year New Year's Eve and Day will be quiet in our household, as usual. Mike has to be at work at crazy hour both days (4 a.m.), so we're not going to be doing much late-night celebrating on New Year's Eve. Not that we would anyway. The turning of 2007 to 2008 calls for more reflection than celebration for us. I have spent some time the past few days thinking back on 2007, which was a great year in some ways for us but pretty frustrating in other ways. We've had some challenging times and hard lessons to learn about people and about life. This fall it seemed like we had one inconvenience after the other, climaxing with the water heater incident earlier this month. All of these inconveniences are minor as individual incidents, but taken as a whole, they challenge us to stay positive and realize sometimes seasons of life are just tough.
Here are some things about 2007 I'm thankful for:
-- Visiting my alma mater, the University of Missouri-Columbia, in January, after not having been there for more than 10 years.
-- Getting to see Mike's alma mater, the University of California-Berkeley, during a trip to the San Francisco area in March.
-- A great summer. We took several day trips and a couple of weekend trips to places in Colorado we'd never been or hadn't been in a long time. Most memorable was a day hike in August along an old mining road from Crested Butte to Marble.
-- A great Beginning Reporting class in the fall at Metro State College of Denver. Each class I teach is so different because each group of students gives the class as a whole a different personality. My students this fall were a joy to teach because they were eager to learn and highly motivated.
-- The Colorado Rockies' amazing post-season run to the World Series. I got to see the Rox clinch the National League championship in Denver and went to my first World Series game with my dad, brother Jeff and sister-in-law Sue. Mike got to cover the World Series games from Denver and Fenway Park in Boston. Despite the Rockies' loss in the series, "Rocktober" is a month we'll never forget.
-- In September we celebrated my mom and dad's 40th wedding anniversary with a suprise party and went to Mike's brother's wedding in Hawaii. You can't complain about a year too much if it included a trip to Hawaii, right?
As I've gotten older, one thing I do notice about New Year's is that I experience the hope of a new year more than I did when I was younger. I know it's a cliche, but I look forward to a fresh start in 2008. I've had fun this week putting our Christmas decorations away and in the process, cleaning some things out, throwing a lot of stuff away and making things different.
Out with the old and in with the new. I'm ready for it. How about you?
