Chris' Christian Blog

New Years Eve

"New Years Eve" 

New Year's Eve has meant a lot of different things in my lifetime. When I was little it was merely another day. There were many times I'd wake up on New Year's Day to be served my mom's traditional pork ribs and kraut. She was a firm believer that eating these on new Year's Day brought one luck throughout the year. However the previous night we had done nothing any different so we had no idea that there was any significance to the date. I believe that it finally occurred to me that the calendar had real significance when I was about eight years old and heard that it was New Year's Day.

As I got older New Year's Eve became a night of intense partying. How many New Year's Eves went by that I was too oblivious to even realize that midnight had came and went is something I'll probably never know. My priority at the time wasn't on celebrating the passage of time. It was on eliminating all consciousness from my mind and partying until i dropped.

Then the years of partying and living a life on the edge finally caught up with me. I got sober and stayed that way. Every year after that I went to a new years Eve function sponsored by the local twelve step recovery halfway house. It was always a big deal and over two hundred people on average would show up. The usual price of admission was around $2.00 and a can of food to donate to the local food pantry. It was nice to be able to wake up on New Years Day and remember where I had been the night before. It was nice not to wake up in a celll or wake up asking myself those three and four word questions: "Where's my car? What did I do? Who's this woman?"

New Years Eve this year will probably either find me in bed asleep when the ball drops or doing reviews on WDC. I love doing reviews. I live alone now that my wife has passed and don't have a whole lot going on in my life. I no longer live in the same city where I attended the halfway house sobriety function and I'm unaware of any such functions locally. So more than likely I'll bring in the New Year online doing reviews and blogging. I can't think of a better way to do so anyway!