With New Year’s Eve upon us, I made an effort to think back of the more memorable ways I celebrated the holiday through the years. It wasn’t easy, as my memory bank was mostly empty. Maybe you can relate. I scanned through the past 15 years on my computer calendar and soon realized why I couldn’t remember how I spent most New Year’s Eves — they simply weren’t memorable. Fifteen years. Zilch. I decided I wasn’t trying enough, and, more than likely, I wouldn’t put any fun stuff in my work calendar anyway. With some effort, and going back more than 15 years, I uncovered a few.

From my youth, I mostly recall being with my family and watching Dick Clark ring in the new year on TV. It was actually only 11 p.m. our time, but that was late enough for me. My siblings and I would wake Dad up from snoozing in his recliner, we would watch the ball drop, and we would all go to bed.

While in college, I spent a New Year’s Eve in sunny Florida competing in a wrestling tournament. The year was 1989, and my friend and teammate Glen (who wasn’t particularly known for telling jokes) hinted at the weather and then commented on how it was going to be in the nineties tomorrow (1990s). He waited for a decade and a warm-weather climate to share that joke. Worse yet, I still remember it.

Jolene and I had our first child, Sara, on Dec. 27, 1997. Just a few days later, with baby in tow, we joined a group of friends for dinner at The Corn Patch in Grimes. Jolene was a trooper, as I can only imagine how tired and sore she was. We may have still been up at midnight, but our only toast would have been to feed our new baby and change a diaper.

Just a few years after that, we, like many of you, prepared for Y2K, worried about how our electronic devices would all fail. Jolene and I hesitantly attended a community celebration on New Year’s Eve with a group of friends, fully expecting all kinds of problems to happen. Thankfully, none did.

Maybe the most visual memory of New Year’s Eve was a year when Jolene and I invited friends over to our home. I placed a line of plastic shot glasses on our glass-top stove to prepare drinks for a toast. My friend Steve leaned against the stove and bumped a burner knob, turning the stovetop on. Those plastic glasses melted in mere seconds, creating quite a mess on the stove and a lengthy scraping project for New Year’s Day.

Well, Dick Clark is no longer with us. It won’t be in the nineties tomorrow. Y2K is a thing of the past. And plastic cups won’t be on the stove. I may not recall anything memorable from New Year’s Eve this year, but that’s just fine with me.

Have a happy New Year, and thanks for reading.

Shane Goodman
President and Publisher
Big Green Umbrella Media
shane@dmcityview.com
515-953-4822, ext. 305
www.thedailyumbrella.com

See Shane Goodman's past columns here.

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