I can remember thinking as a child that New Year’s Eve must be the best party on earth. I could only imagine what I was missing as I watched my mother spend hours getting ready, her hair in curlers from the night before, an oatmeal mask on her face at some point, and other beauty treatments all day long. This exaggerated process only added to my curiosity. What was all the hoopla about?

As I saw my parents emerge from their dressing room with fresh faces and fabulous outfits, they exuded a unique excitement I could not understand. I remember thinking, “They must have a secret.”

Today, my mother tells me that what I was witnessing was nothing special. She admits that the evening was a lot of fun, and that it gave everyone a chance to go out and socialize. But she doesn’t remember it as an exclusive event.

“Well, what kinds of things did you do, Mom?” I ask, but she can’t really remember. “What did you drink?”
“Oh, I remember those tropical drinks we had back then, like the Pink Squirrel and the Grasshopper.” (While I have searched through all of my recipe books, I cannot seem to find anything for the Pink Squirrel, but my mother gladly gave out the recipe for a Grasshopper. I believe it was her favorite.)

Later on, when I was old enough to go to parties with them, I tried to absorb the excitement I had seen on my parent’s faces years earlier. In reality, I was a bored teenager. I guess I didn’t quite understand the mood. I was not old enough to appreciate what it meant to welcome another year, nor was I able to look back nostalgically at a year that had past.

I asked our friend Boogie about what it meant to ring in the New Year in my mother’s day, the 50s and 60s. He said that New Year’s Eve was more of a cultural tradition in his New Orleans neighborhood. “It was actually very nostalgic.” Families and friends that had grown up together would get together on New Year’s Eve as a celebration of another year of friendship. “The nostalgia,” he continues, “was not in the night itself, but in gathering with people you had known for so long, and in looking back on the great times you had together.”

When he said that, I realized he was right. While I hardly remember what I did as a child on December 31, I do remember the traditions my mother continued on January 1. She baked the traditional Greek vasilopita, a sweet bread decorated with nuts and dried fruit, for the first of the year. We gathered as a family to cut the bread and then search our piece for a coin. Greek tradition holds that the bearer of the hidden coin will have luck throughout the next year. It was a great celebration and a wonderful tradition we continue today.

My mother was probably right when she said that her New Year’s Eve party was really nothing special, if special means auditoriums filled with hundreds of people and large bands and fireworks that last for hours. There were only small, intimate moments with close friends and family. Moments filled with nostalgia about life, the past year, and what it meant to see your best friend with her first grey hair. New Year’s Eve was savoring memories and life in that one phrase, “Happy New Year!” And that was certainly special.

Copyright 2003, M&L Publishing, all rights reserved.