1/04/2005

Rules for New Year’s

Every year I wonder about New Year’s Day. Since I teach, my new year happens every time a semester starts. August is really New Year’s Day to me, but then we have the mini-beginning of Spring semester too. Summer rolls around, and it’s thank God that year’s over. This year I really am pretty happy to say goodbye to 2004, which was a difficult year, but I still don’t feel any better about New Year’s celebrations.

Chris wanted me to go to a party with him with a few of his friends and a bunch of other people he didn’t know. He didn’t tell me about it until it was really too late to get a babysitter, and I didn’t really want to go either (I don’t know most of these people—it turns out he didn’t know anybody but his host!), so I told him it was fine if he went, and I’d stay home. Is this a sign of a healthy relationship that gives room to both people, or the glaring violation of all the codes of romantic life that it seems on the surface?

Then there’s the food thing. So much of our family ritual involves food. For Christmas Eve for more years than I can count Chris and I have been eating oyster stew for dinner (the kids would never eat it, so it’s our treat). Christmas Eve without oyster stew just sounds wrong. This is a personal ritual, not a shared one, but the New Year’s rolls around and there’s that luck and money thing—greens and black-eyed peas (is this just a Southern thing). I absolutely can’t stand black-eyed peas. Their texture is just nauseating. Greens are OK, but nobody else in my family will eat them—and you can’t just make a few greens. It seems so stupid and impractical to make food nobody wants so you can have a traditional token bite or two. A couple of years ago, I finally decided I wasn’t cooking them anymore—that luck and money thing had never really seemed to work anyhow. But still every New Year’s Eve my mother calls to tell me she’s cooking them, and we’re welcome to come eat with them. I’m not superstitious as a rule, but still feel every year that bankruptcy is bound to strike since I didn’t cook collards.

Resolutions are the biggest issue, really, because they transcend the immediate day of January 1 and presumably follow you throughout the year. The newspapers are always running stories this time of year asking people what their resolutions were, and did they keep them, and I read this year about a website that you can actually go log into all year to post your progress on your goals. Ugh. I used to make resolutions, but since I am the sort of person who really makes a resolution every time I make a list, I’ve sort of stopped doing that too. I guess if I had to say what my resolution this year would be it’d be to go to yoga (my first class is tonight). I really need some time for myself right now, especially after two straight weeks of family togetherness. But right now the only yoga classes in town are on Tuesday nights and I often have meetings for School Improvement Council then, so I already know I’m not going to make every class. If I do yoga at home two or three times a week, will that count? The resolution concept seems just so complicated and ridiculous, so prescribed, and so doomed. I wonder if anybody ever keeps theirs?

My little Will just woke up. I’ll resolve to have my hair played with a lot this year. I know I can keep that one.