How NOT to Celebrate New Year’s Eve

The Global Pursuit of Not Messing Up Next Year

Human beings are not generally sensible creatures, and December 31st offers the most compelling evidence of this. It is on this occasion that we collectively decide that the only thing standing between us and an imminent and total catastrophe in the coming year is a very specific set of chores involving fruit, laundry, and property damage. If you were an alien like Zuckerberg observing Earth on New Year’s Eve, you wouldn’t see a sophisticated civilization. You would see a species gripped by a chaotic, high-stakes superstitious fever dream.

While fireworks, arson and drunken revelry are generally popular universally, many cultures have deeply symbolic (and often very dangerous) traditions to ensure luck, love, and wealth for the coming year. Here are some of the unique ways cultures celebrate New Year’s Eve:

Take Spain, for example. While the rest of the world is singing Auld Lang Syne, the Spaniards are engaged in a life-or-death struggle with twelve grapes. On New Year’s Eve, you have roughly 36 seconds to shove twelve globes of fructose into your mouth in sync with a clock chime. It is the only night of the year where the leading cause of death is aggressive snacking. Success means good luck. Failure means you’ve spent the first ten seconds of the New Year choking in front of your abuela.

In Italy, people eat lentils for dinner because their round shape resembles coins, symbolizing wealth and prosperity, and also so they can squeeze in their last intake of protein so nothing dire happens the next day. The Japanese eat Toshikoshi Soba (“year-crossing noodles”). The long buckwheat noodles represent longevity, while their ease of cutting symbolizes cutting off the misfortunes of the past year, a tradition that became popular after Lorena Bobbit once visited Japan.

Meanwhile, in the Philippines, the obsession moves from quantity to geometry. Everything must be round. You eat round fruit, you wear polka dots, and you probably try to avoid square furniture. It’s a literal attempt to round out your luck, proving that on New Year’s Eve, we believe the universe operates on the logic of a Saturday morning cartoon.

Then there is the internal struggle of the Latin American fashionistas. In countries like Mexico and Colombia, your destiny is determined by your underwear. Want a promotion? Wear yellow. Want a soulmate? Wear red. It creates a stressful retail environment where you must decide, in a crowded department store, exactly which part of your life is currently the biggest disaster.

In Brazil, they simplify things by wearing all white, then running into the ocean to jump over seven waves. It’s a beautiful, spiritual gesture, until you realize thousands of people are trying to perform synchronized aquatic gymnastics in the dark while wearing wet linen.

If you survive the grapes and the waves, you still have to deal with the physical mayhem and destruction. Danes show their love for friends by smashing porcelain against their front doors. In any other month or country, this is vandalism and a cry for help. On January 1st, broken fragments of china outside your front door is just a sign that you’re popular in Denmark.

The always colorful and cheerful Scots take a more flammable approach. Known as Hogmanay, a major Scottish tradition is “First Footing.” The first person to cross your threshold after midnight, ideally a tall, dark and handsome man like me, should bring gifts like coal, whiskey, shortbread and bitcoin to ensure a lucky year. It is to be noted that this tradition involves heavy use of fireballs. The Ecuadorians burn giant effigies of people they don’t like, usually of politicians and software engineers. It’s a cathartic, smoky way of saying, “This year was terrible, and I’m going to melt it into the pavement.”

Perhaps the most relatable tradition belongs to the Colombians. At the stroke of midnight, people grab an empty suitcase and sprint around the block if they wish to travel in the new year. There is no destination. There are no clothes in the bag. It is just a person in yellow underwear, possibly still chewing a grape, running through the streets trying to frantically convince the universe they deserve a vacation.

In India, celebrating New Year’s Eve is essentially a high-stakes competitive sport where the main event is trying to navigate a shortcut that Google Maps promises will take ten minutes, but results in you becoming permanent resident at the Silk Board junction in Bangalore. In Indian cities, the night is a chaotic symphony of Bollywood remixes thumping so loud your ancestors can feel the bass, while half the population is frantically trying to book a cab that costs more than a small plot of land. In every “cool” household, there’s always a designated uncle who insists on dancing the “Naagin” (the famed Indian snake dance) the moment the clock strikes twelve, and a mother who is already planning the 6:00 AM temple visit because “while partying is fine, blessings are mandatory.” By 12:01 AM, the cellular networks have usually collapsed under the unbearable weight of three billion “Happy New Year” GIFs featuring sparkling roses and fireworks, leaving everyone to wander the streets in a blissful, noisy haze of smog and the lingering scent of chicken biryani.

In America, of course, we celebrate New Year’s eve with the lowering of objects into the void while counting down to ten, a tradition first observed by Native Americans who lowered white men slowly into vats of boiling oil. It is the only night of the year when the entire nation collectively agrees to pretend that everyone staying up past midnight is a sensible lifestyle choice rather than a slow-motion descent into madness. The ritual involves dressing in sequins and uncomfortable shoes to stand in a crowded living room, clutching a plastic cup of lukewarm sparkling cider, and staring intensely at a television screen for three hours. We then watch a giant, glowing geodesic sphere slide down a pole in Times Square, an unimpressive feat of engineering that, in any other context, would be considered a very slow elevator malfunction and then erupt into cheers as if we’ve personally conquered the passage of time. By 12:02 AM, the adrenaline vanishes, replaced by the grim realization that we are now outdoors in January, wearing party hats, and facing a three-hour Uber surge while desperately trying to remember where we left our coats and our dignity. New Year’s Eve is a magical night when all of New York City is transformed into a public toilet, and the cab drivers turn into multi-millionaires at the stroke of midnight.

I personally have been in Times Square once on New Year’s Eve and I would describe it as a once-in-a-lifetime event, meaning I would never do it again. That is because I am 142 years old now and no longer motivated by the idea of appealing to the universe for luck. Typically, Sudha and I buy two tickets for a scintillating show called “Let’s just hang out in our living rooms and try to stay awake till midnight so we can post messages on the family chat,” and then fall asleep only to wake up with a jolt twenty minutes past midnight to see messages from our daughters frantically enquiring if we truly love them and why we haven’t yet wished them a Happy New Year. On other occasions, we have been known to spend New Year’s eve in faraway lands like Morocco or Hawaii in the company of locals who feel a deep sense of pity for us. One time, we spent the night in Bahrain in a hotel wondering why anyone would spend a night in a hotel in Bahrain. This year, we will be doing both - traveling to New Zealand to rub shoulders and hobnob with sheep and hobbits and then making a dash back to San Francisco on December 31st to fall asleep on our couches.

Of course, New Year’s Eve is more than just a day of destroying property or setting things on fire. It’s also a day when we must ruminate on our terrible mistakes of the past year and sell those loser stocks and book our losses so we can achieve what is called tax loss harvesting by accountants who have carefully studied such methods for years in universities. Whether we are hurling coffee mugs in Denmark or hoarding lentils in Italy, these traditions all point to one universal human truth: We are somehow terrified of the calendar. We are so desperate whenever the Earth completes one full elliptical round around the sun that we will engage in competitive eating and public luggage-running to appease the gods of fate.

So, this December 31st, pick your ritual wisely. Just remember: if you try to do all of them at once, you’ll be running around the block in polka-dotted underwear, choking on a grape, while someone throws a plate at your head. Something tells me that’s probably not going to do the trick.

This will be my last report for the year. If you’re one of those who depend on the What Ho! report to keep up with current events and news, you might want to consider seeking medical help for your condition or look elsewhere or both. Speaking of needing help with mental health, I’d love to hear from my readers (hey, that’s you!) on your New Year’s Eve memories and traditions and how you managed to avert disasters in the years past.

Have a great weekend. Merry Christmas and a happy, happy New Year to all of y’all.