Happy New Year!

 

The skies are a perfect blue and feature random splotches of fluffy white clouds on this first day of January 2025. The wind is blowing just enough to sway the bare tree branches and add to the chill on this 49 degree day. Tom and I are recovering after a week long bout of some winter flu bug I picked up on my football game travels to Fargo. (We won! Beat South Dakota State University in the semifinals  28-21!) The fireplace feels delightful as do the incrementally longer days and confidence in our improving health as we welcome 2025. 

 

My first recollection of a new year celebration involves new year’s eve with my siblings at home on the farm; it might have been 1967. Our parents were out celebrating that evening with their friends, but before they left, we learned that our kid party at home would include sloppy joes, potato chips, onion dip, and to drink…. 7-Up! Our oldest sibling, Laurie, was officially in charge, but Robert, only a year and a half younger, had his own ideas of who was the leader of our little pack of four. As supper time approached and we got hungry, he deferred and Laurie responsibly took the lead.

 

We gobbled up our party food to our hearts delight and since cleaning the kitchen was routine and expected, I’m sure we did. We played Wahoo, listened to 45’s on the hi-fi and danced around the living room which was our idea of a party. At some point, we must have become unsure if our party plans were sufficient for this auspicious night and Robert got an idea. 

 

Although I credit Robert for dreaming up the plan, it might have been Laurie or Pam. Apparently we needed confetti to toss wildly into the air to welcome 1967 at the stroke of midnight! Our parents probably provided noisy horns to blow or streamers to throw, but we didn’t have confetti. We did have a number of huge well-worn Christmas catalogs though and we soon discovered that the glossy pages, when torn into miniscule pieces, made magical confetti! I’m not sure why we were so motivated, but with four of us working we cut and tore confetti with energy. When midnight arrived on the east coast and the ball in Time’s Square dropped, we watched and waited. Perfect, we had another hour to work. 

 

With short snack breaks for more 7-up and chips and fewer and fewer catalogs to shred, the midnight hour approached in the Central Time Zone. Bowls full of confetti were staged strategically around our feet in the living room as the moment approached so each of us could grab and throw them high into the air at the appointed time. The bigger bowls were nearer to the older kids, but as the youngest, I was proudly responsible for a bowl or two too. 

 

I believe Robert used his brand new water resistant, self-winding, luminous hands wrist watch for our midnight count down. On his cue and with added screams of “Happy New Year!” we threw all the confetti as high as we could. The room was filled with colorful confetti! Our hair, our shirts, our eyelashes, the furniture, the rugs, the coffee table and all the lamps were covered with a fabulous blizzard of billions of little paper bits. It was so beautiful in our eyes, but soon it settled and we recognized a minor dilemma. We needed to clean this mess up before Mom and Dad got home.

We swept, dusted and vacuumed up as much of the confetti as quickly as we could that night. We were pretty confident that we had done a good enough job but Mom saw the evidence right away the next day. She questioned us about our confetti escapades in disbelief. Many weeks later I clearly recall Mom up on a step stool cleaning lots of confetti out of the flush mounted ceiling lamp fixtures in the living room. I watched as she shook her head in amazement that her kids would spend time creating that much confetti to throw high in the air on New Year's Eve. I think she also smiled a little.