So what do you do for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day? The one ritual I have is to go over one or more of those month-by-month Year in Review stories, thinking about the year gone by, including thinking about the year gone by in my life. We never, ever go out on New Year’s Eve, but we do stay up until midnight. (When our kids were little, we let them stay up until the ball dropped on Times Square, not explaining that we were in Central Time and New York City was an hour ahead. They thought they were staying up until midnight, but they were only staying up until 11:00 p.m. CT. That was very wicked of us, I admit, to let them be deceived.)
On New Year’s Day, the custom in Oklahoma was to have black eyed peas for good luck. Then we moved to Wisconsin where good luck comes from eating pickled herring. Even though Wisconsin, on the whole, has had better luck than Oklahoma, we continued to have black eyed peas, which were hard to even find up north. I’m not sure what people eat for luck in Virginia. (If anyone knows, please tell me. At least it’s easy to find black eyed peas here.) We also eat junk–dips and such–on New Year’s Eve and throughout the next day, though by then, after the Christmas feast, we are pretty much tired of such fare and eager to get back to normal. That’s about it. Surely some of you have some better ideas, don’t you?
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