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Jan 4, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

My only real New Year tradition has been the Year In Review, where I look back over my entire year of journaling and see what I've done and what I've endured. It wasn't as much this year as the year before, which I have mixed feelings about (relief, embarrassment, skepticism). This year I added in a new tradition that I hope will stick: choosing a word for the year to come. 2020's word is Courage. I'm going to try to be brave enough to take up space in the lives of my friends and loved ones. Here's hoping that works out okay. <3

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When I was small, my father -- who at the time was playing the viola in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra -- would come back right before midnight, at 11:30 PM or so. He'd have bought chocolates from the chocolate place near Columbia University that used to be Katherine Hepburn's chocolate place (they have a letter from her framed in the window) and caviar. The real kind, too expensive to have more than once a year. My mother bought black Russian bread and cut it into tiny, thumb-sized squares, and sliced lemons as thin as possible. There was butter in a huge, European-style pat. My baby brother and I were allowed champagne, one glass each.

The four of us would eat the caviar spread on butter on that bread; it is an indescribable richness of salt and sea-fat, a flavor I can't recreate. Right up until five minutes to midnight we would talk, and the question was 'what do you want to do in the New Year' -- and then we would watch the ball drop in Times Square, on the TV. I grew up in NYC but I've never once done Times Square in person. Why would you.

After midnight, Dad put on Schubert's 'Winterriese'. It is a terribly depressing song cycle for the New Year, I know. I'm kind of named after it. Der Lindenbaum. It's his favorite Schubert.

I haven't spent New Year with my parents in a long time.

I don't think I've ever told anyone this story this way, before.

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Every year my granddaddy used to call us on New Year’s Eve and tell us the same bad joke: “Did you know that if you go downtown today, you’ll see a man with as many noses on his face as there are days left in the year?” He died in 2015 so now I call my dad, his son, and tell him the joke.

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Jan 4, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

Every New year's day I listen to three pieces of music, Claude Debussy's Arabesque 1, his string quartet in G minor, and Bela Bartok's string quartet #1. It doesn't have to happen right at midnight, just at some point that day. They're my three favorite pieces of music and I love coming back to them every year as a slightly different person. I try to remember the endless relay race of people I've been and the thoughts and hopes and fears they had that brought me to me.

For anyone wishing to take a stab at any of these, this is my lineup:

-Arabesque: There's a million recordings of this, but the jean michel guestin one on youtube is my favorite (the thumbnail is waterlilies). Everybody seems to want to play this fast and really hype the rising and falling flourishes, but the JMG recording is slower. You feel the space between every note and I am brought to tears by beauty of it.

-Debussy String Quartet: I do a new recording every year, this year's was by the Kodaly Quartet and it was top 3 for sure.

-Bartok String Quartet 1: I go straight for the Takacs Quartet recording every year. They're my fav chamber group and their version of this us the uncontested champion of my heart.

Happy New Year all!

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Jan 4, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

Because my spouse and I spend other holidays with our families, we have claimed New Years Eve as our very own. Every year we make an elaborate meal, hopefully something challenging and complicated and delicious, and then we eat it together with our kid. We open gifts from one another and drink cocktails. Then we don’t do the dishes until next year.

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Jan 4, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

My tradition is one that I share with many of my hockey-writing colleagues. New Year's Eve is a traditional night for NHL games and Detroit always hosts one. If the game goes simply and the players/coaches talk to us more quickly than normal, I can rush home and arrive in the last 10 minutes of the year - this time I got home at 11:54.

If any step goes wrong, though, I'll be ringing in the new year on I-75 somewhere between Detroit and Royal Oak. I've done that more often than I've gotten home.

Like Sarah, I've started the tradition of adopting a word for the new year - mine is "Forward". Instead of living my life in retreat from my fears, I'm going to keep moving forward, even if something goes wrong. I'm going to try to be more social without fearing rejection and escape my comfort zone.

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Jan 4, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

Yes! Soviet people tended to consider New Year's Eve and Day the most important holidays of the year, because they were the only officially sanctioned Winter Holidays (this is a very broad generalization and glosses over many religious Soviet people who had to adapt their traditions to living in the USSR). These traditions have persisted in my family, and their most generic version is: eating a lot, including but limited to Olivier Salad (which is boiled eggs, carrots, potatoes, and meat, all mixed together with mayo and peas), watching a Soviet comedy, and drinking champagne as the Kremlin clock strikes twelve.

These days, even these traditions are changing, for example, these days we watch the ball fall in Times Square instead of listening to the Kremlin clock. I am trying to make my own tradition, but not super successful yet -- the closest I've come is realizing that I really appreciate having a moment of quiet reflection, on my own, as the year ends.

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Jan 4, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

We have now made a tradition of making chocolate mousse and having it with oranges and berries and a rich tawny port on New Year's Eve. I could say something about it being to remind us of the bitter and the sweet, the importance of new things and old, or a final dessert and post-annual wine to celebrate the passing of a year before we welcome the new year with crepes and latkes, but that would be as made up as any tradition (but much more recently, so we'd remember it was made up). Really, it's just a nice relaxing and delicious thing to do together.

But this year we spent some time talking about what we might want to do as an intentional, chosen tradition.

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Jan 4, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

My social group splintered decades ago, so we always end up going to two New Year's Eve parties. I'm always reluctant to leave the first one and sad about having missed two-thirds of the second one. But the New Year's Day tradition is much nicer. Long ago, a friend of ours who worked in the restaurant business never, ever got to attend a New Year's Eve party at all because wherever he was working was either open, or closed but catering other people's parties. So he started having a Hair of the Dog party on New Year's Day, starting at a civilized hour (three pm) and going until people got tired, which was generally around ten in the evening. Since he was a skilled and enthusiastic cook, the food was fabulous. People who had been glittering and made-up the night before would drag in in their comfy sweaters, looking bleary, and everybody eats a lot and might drink a little and settles deeper and deeper into chairs and couches, and some people play card games, and the conversation is slightly spacy but very benign, and kids run around with cookies or celery sticks in their hands, full of energy since most of them were allowed to stay up til midnight but didn't manage to stay awake. It's the best party of the year whether you drank too much on New Year's, or just enough, or, like me, had half a glass of champagne. I see people I never see any other time at that party. It is magic. Our host is retired now and can and does come to Eve parties, but he still holds the tradition. And he gets goat butter for me, because he always has good bread and I can't eat cow's-milk products.

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Jan 4, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

I like to be alone at midnight on New Year's, and I like to be outside, and I like to be listening to music. (As a Southern Hemisphere person, that middle requirement isn't usually a pain to fulfil, fortunately.)

Choosing the song I listen to at the very moment of midnight is a year-long enterprise, of sorts, because my tradition is for that song to be my favourite song of the year-that-was. As befits my list-builder personality, I keep a ranked playlist of my most beloved music of each calendar year; songs will shuffle up and down in ranking through the year, but the very best song tends to find that top spot and stay there. For afterwards, I pick one or two more songs that I like and that represent my hopes for the coming year a little - these ones don't have to be from the outgoing year, but I do have to have *heard* them for the first time that year.

I set up this bespoke playlist on my tiny iPod (a third-generation nano, twelve years old and still going strong!) and then, a few minutes before midnight, I step outside, and press play, and dance. Midnight will fall at some point during my first, favourite song; it doesn't matter exactly when, because the point is to be doing something that makes me happy at midnight, rather than watching the clock and fretting about the precise moment.

Nowadays I live in a place where the NYE fireworks are hard to avoid, and so I generally have a sense of when the moment arrives; but the happiness persists.

[For the record: my playlist this year was, in order, Nakhane's "New Brighton" (featuring ANOHNI), Weyes Blood's "Movies", Jenny Hval's "Ashes To Ashes".]

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Jan 4, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

My mother always told me you have to eat beans on New Years for money and luck (if you’re from the south this may sound very wrong), any beans will do. This year I found some fun heirloom variety beans at the store, but when I soaked them overnight they basically turned to mush. I have diligently continued on with them, even baked them, but they are SO BAD that my partner and I are seriously considering throwing out the rest. I have no idea what this means, but I don’t think it’s good.

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New Year's Day I go for a hike or get out on the water. This year got kayaking and hiking, both!

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Jan 4, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

On NYE itself, we usually play board games with our neighbors, who we are lucky to have. And aside from that I do a Year in Review, a bit on paper, a bit in my mind, trying to recall the highlights, and that is put together in a Holiday Letter that I put a fair of work into. It's a meditative, and fun exercise. This year -- well it's been quite the year of change for me, a lot of portents and goals that were all waylaid. And so, I've been coming to grips with that, trying to focus not on the goals that were not achieved, but the ones that I can foresee as do-able in 2020.

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Jan 4, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

Champagne and caviar on New Year's Eve, followed by scrambled eggs with caviar for New Year's brunch.

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Jan 5, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

Just after midnight at New Year we will let the old year out, and the new year in. I guess this only works if you have a back door! It's as simple as opening the back door and saying goodbye to the old year, thinking whether we'll miss it or are glad to see the back of it, giving it a minute or so to clear out of the house, and closing the door. Then we go straight to the front door to let the new year in, thinking about what we are looking forward to in the next 12 months.

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Jan 4, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

I grew up in Mississippi, so there's only one New Year's tradition that was drilled into me as a child: black-eyed peas. Most of the winter traditions with my daughters revolve around the Solstice, but I've kept the tradition of black-eyed peas alive and carried it with me to upstate New York. This year, the girls, the grandparents, and I watched Doctor Who and Star Trek and played games, including exotic flavors of Uno and the Sailor Moon Monopoly game they got me as a Solstice gift. It's not as refined and carefully curated as some of the amazing experiences others have posted here, but I wouldn't change a thing about it (though I'm definitely taking the Great Artist approach and stealing liberally from everyone in this thread for the coming year).

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I lost my substack emails for some reason so I'm just catching up, but my one cherished NYE activity is lighting lots and lots of sparklers and waving them around like an under-supervised five-year-old.

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