Random Rants


Why I Hate New Year
I hate New Year's Night. Yes, I do. New Year is the one holiday I could really do without.

Why, you ask. Well, there are a couple of reasons. First of all, new year is very badly timed. Only a week before there have been two or three (depending on your location) days of Christmas. I'm just not in the mood for another holiday so soon after that. Besides, here in Germany holiday means that public life comes to an almost complete standstill. Shops and banks are closed, busses and trams run very infrequently, over the Christmas days even a lot of cinemas and theaters are closed down. Add in weekends (like the two Sundays just before Christmas Eve and New Year's Night) and even grocery shopping becomes a big hassle.

Secondly, New Year's Night generally means big parties with lots of dancing and drinking. Which simply isn't my preferred mode of celebrating anything. Of course, nobody is forced to go to any parties and in fact I don't. But answering "at home" when people ask you where you've been for New Year's Night tends to get you weird looks, especially if you're my age.

Thirdly, I'm not even sure that a new year really is a reason to celebrate. For what does New Year really mean? Just a few numbers changing on a calendar, that's all. I don't really subscribe to all that new year, fresh start, fresh chance stuff. That's also the reason why I haven't been making any New Year's resolutions since I was twelve. Because they're meaningless. If you really want to change something in your life, then why wait for New Year? You can do that right away.

Finally, I have a very personal reason for not liking New Year. For through most of my childhood, my New Year Nights weren't very enjoyable. When I was a kid, my parents used to share a holiday house with another family. The holiday house was (and still is in fact) located in a very small village called Teufelsmoor (Devil's Moor) outside Bremen. And we'd always spend New Year at Teufelsmoor. Only problem: I hated Teufelsmoor. Actually, the Teufelsmoor house is a nice place in the summer, situated in the middle of fields and birch woods. Lots of things to do, places to explore.

But on New Year's Night it was awful. The house was always crammed with people - us, the other family and their friends - and I didn't get along with most of them. There were more people than beds, and I would always end up on an inflatable mattress on the floor or squeezed between my parents into an uncomfortable bed. Sleeping was out of the question. Besides, New Year's Night at Teufelsmoor was incredibly boring. I was stuck at the house with lots of old people (the kids of the other family were older than me and generally at a party somewhere) and because we were in the middle of nowhere, there were none of the traditional fireworks. At least, they weren't visible. For we could hear the fireworks going off in Osterholz-Scharmbeck or Penningbüttel, like canon shots on the horizon. I have always imagined that that's what war must sound like. Not a very pleasant thing to associate with New Year's Night.

I haven't spent a New Year's Night at Teufelsmoor since I was 13 or 14. And all in all, my general aversion against the place has long evaporated. Only once a year it comes back. On New Year's Night.





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