If you’ve read my columns for any length of time, you know that I do not care much for the hubbub of the New Year’s Eve celebration rituals. And so it was this year. Midnight came and went in these parts with little fanfare, other than the Big Ball drops on television. In fact, I lost my battle with the Sandman just after 11pm and slept the old year away. My birthday is the day before the Eve, and it has been a very long time since I could celebrate both with equal enthusiasm. It is one day or the other. This year, with a visit from the family, my birthday won, enthusiastically.
I didn’t always have an aversion to the New Year. In fact, my first experiences with New Year’s celebrations were pretty good ones, as a whole. New Year’s was always the capper to an extra busy week at our house. Christmas and my birthday were done and the, hard to celebrate when you’re a kid, New Year was the last hoorah before school resumed.
When I was a kid and into my teens, most of my New Year’s Eve partying was done with Grandma Berry at her little house on Blevins Street. I would pack my bag and spend the night. She would lay in a supply of goodies, which included lemon sherbet. It was her idea of a great treat, but not so much mine. We also had ginger ale. The oyster stew was for New Year’s Day. She was always a kid at heart and ready for a good time.
Yes indeed, we had grand times. We ate the lemon sherbet and sugar wafer cookies, and played gin rummy. Eventually we watched Guy Lombardo and his orchestra musically welcome in the New Year on her ancient black and white television set. And if I didn’t stay awake until midnight, she woke me for the countdown with a hale and hearty “Happy New Year!”
In between the sherbet and the good wishes, Grandma would talk about other New Year’s she had known. Her early memories were wrapped around popcorn, apples, homemade ice cream and house parties. She and her family gathered around the kitchen cook stove for an evening of old stories and song singing. It was heady stuff.
During her marriage to my grandpa, who was a school teacher, the Christmas holidays were busily spent with school activities. Every country school put on a Christmas play and party for the community it served. Grandma’s dog-eared copy of Charles Dickens ‘A Christmas Carol’ attests to her participation in many a school production.
No matter how tough the times, Frank and Fern Berry hosted an oyster stew dinner on New Year’s for family, friends and neighbors. Any kind of fresh or salted cod worked in a pinch. Grandma and Grandpa also celebrated Grandpa’s birthday and their wedding anniversary in late December. It was a festive time for them and Grandma loved to share the memories.
Grandma clearly enjoyed the New Year’s celebration. She once saw a couple she knew dancing in the crowd on the Lawrence Welk Show. That was a really big deal for New Year’s. When it was midnight she enjoyed shedding a tear for Auld Lang Sine, the tune tugging at her heart. It didn’t really matter if I made it to midnight or not. I wouldn’t doubt that she probably slipped off to the pantry to add a ‘nip’ to her ginger ale.
Faithful to her tradition, Grandma rose early to make rye bread, called her kids to remind them come to dinner and made her New Year’s Day oyster stew.
When Grandma and I were both older, she discovered that the celebration of the New Year was a big deal at my uncle’s house in Toledo, and there were numerous small children in residence. This was a whole new audience for her stories and kids who would stay awake.
We’ve made a lot of trips around the sun since my Blevins Street days and I’ve welcomed a lot of new years in a lot of ways. But some of the best remain those spent in the little house on Blevins Street, in the company of Lawrence Welk, Guy Lombardo, and Grandma Berry. We dined on lemon sherbet from the dining room dishes and laughed a lot. Sometimes the big things are best done simply.
May 2024 be uneventful and kind to us all.