Sorry for long post. TL;DR version. Street wasn’t visible at all through the red firecracker paper and I ‘became a man’ by being allowed to light the strings of crackers.
It was in the late 60’s or early 70’s when I was still a preteen. We used to go to my related by marriage Uncle and Auntie’s house to celebrate along with their extended family My Uncle worked a restaurant up the street and he’d come home about 11 or 11:30 and start handing out money from his tips to all the kids. This signaled the New Year was about to come.
We’d have countless packs of firecrackers and sparklers and have firecracker fights, throwing single crackers at each other trying to get them to pop as close to each other as possible. Then just before midnight we’d start burning the strings of firecrackers, mostly 5,000 and 10,000 cracker strings one string at a time. We had an unspoken rivalry with the people across the street on how could burn more crackers. Some years we’d win, other years the would. This year we definitively won.
There was a 1am curfew for setting off the crackers and by 12:30 or so, we’d start putting up two and three strings of crackers (the pole couldn’t handle four) at a time to burn them quicker. We usually used a punk to light the crackers, But when we strung three, we switched to a road flare to make sure they were all lit at the same time. I was allowed to light them the the punk or a match before, but this was the first time I handled and used a flare. I was a man before puberty!
Back then we didn’t save any firecrackers for the next year, everything except the sparklers had to be burned before 1am. We put up a second pole, but even that wasn’t enough. So one of the metal trash cans was brought out, strings of crackers were thrown in and the flare tossed in to start the thunder! The neighbors were quiet but we still had more to go. The trash can was on fire and more strings were thrown in. The street was completely covered in red ‘snow’. As the adults were sweeping up the street, I still had loose packs of crackers to get rid of. Sometimes throwing them too close to the adults because they wanted them near their piles for easier cleanup and sometimes it set a pile on fire, causing the unburnt crackers to go off.
We made the 1am curfew and after the street cleanup, which would be red for months because of the rain (it always rained on New Year’s Day we “men” would go in to eat the first meal of the day. Then the dinner table would be cleared and local variation of poker (don’t know how to spell the name of the game) would be played. The older adults on the dinner table and the younger adults on the makeshift overflow table.
It was the local version of A Christmas Story. We headed home about 3-4am and I slept in the car and my Dad probably carried me to bed. All was right with the world!
What a wonderful memory! We used to go out on the porch and bang pots and pans. I hear it’s an urban things. When my kids were little, we lived in the country, but we still banged pots and pans together and shouted, “Happy New Year!”
This was our most memorable, that’s for sure: New Year’s 2001. The wife and I spent the holiday in Hua Hin, on the upper peninsula of southern Thailand and along the Gulf of Thailand coast. The local beachside Hilton was scheduled to hold a huge fireworks show.Not being Hilton gusts, we wandered down to the beach to watch it from there. It was very dark, and come the stroke of midnight we discovered the fireworks were being shot off RIGHT THERE where we were standing. So we spent the first moments of the new millennium fleeing for our lives and laughing hysterically.
I guess as a good memory I have to say; when the kids were young we were camping on a lake in HotSprings, Ar. The kids had a busy day of fishing, swimming, boat riding. We cooked on a campfire. After eating we went to the edge of the lake to watch a fireworks display. I brought a sheet to put on the ground. We ended up all huddled under the sheet together because of mosquitoes.
I could smell the sun on my babes. I felt like a hen sitting her nest of chicks. A good memory.
My Dad’s family had a superstition that if someone with “a dark complexion” was the first to enter the house in the New Year, then peace and prosperity would follow our family all year long. We and our friends and relatives were all white as snowflakes, and they’d be coming over on New Years Day, so Dad did the next best thing, as soon as he could.
We had a black cat, so at 12:01 AM on New Years Day, Dad would carry our cat out onto the front porch, and the door would be shut behind him. He’d ring the doorbell, we’d open it, and holding the cat in front of him (to ensure that a dark-complexioned creature was the first in the house in the New Year), Dad would walk inside.
Peace and prosperity always followed. Which reminds me–I need to take my current black cat outside for a minute, and come back in.
My parents always went out to a fancy event (evening gown/tuxedo) on NYE, and before I was old enough to take charge myself, we had a sitter. One year, I spent the evening with a paper punch and construction paper, making confetti, and at midnight, we opened the front door and flung it in the air.
It was a wet NYE, and the next morning, the porch and steps were stained in multi-colors. Mom was not impressed…
For the most part, I didn’t much care about seeing in the new year, but one time, some friends had a gathering for games. I seem to recall some involved trivia and at least one included singing. After insisting that they refused to sing, **FCD **and our friend Alice ended up singing the most! It was hilarious!
I think that was probably the last time I was even awake at midnight. Yeah, I’m a real party animal!
The year we spent NYE on the Serengeti. The lodge we were staying at had special food and wine flown in for the celebration. Watching the wildlife wander by while having dinner was pretty special.
Two of them, 1996 and 1997. I was a chat host on AOL. The area was called “The Amazing Instant Novelist,” or AIN.
A fellow hostie and I rang in the New Year for all the Continental US time zones. By the time the West Coast passed midnight, she and I were so tired we were slap happy. It was total, complete fun. We enjoyed bringing in 1996 so much, we signed up in advance to do 1997.
When I was a kid, my aunt and uncle lived for a while in a campground in the Florida Keys. One year we visited them over the holidays and spent New Year’s Eve in the pool. That was awesome.
Paraphrasing Robin Williams IIRC: If you can remember New Years, you weren’t really there.
I recall when I was about 10, abusing the Xmas-gift Brownie camera when we visited cousins that next weekend. And I blasted a trombone at one midnight-ball-drop with echoes bouncing up the canyon walls. But most new years padded in on little cat feet with nothing momentous to remember.
Along with a couple of NSFW parties, the best New Year’s I can recall was one when we were stationed in Germany in the early 80s. We owned a VW pop-top camper and, about 11:30, packed up the two kids and drove up into the hills surrounding the village we lived in. We popped the top up, put the kids in the upper bunk with hot chocolate and cookies, poured ourselves two flutes of champagne, and watched the fireworks lighting up the vineyards and all the little villages down below. Quite magical!
For Y2K, I hosted a dinner and blind sparkling wine/champagne-tasting party for eight. A question had been raised over the prior year with a friend about how well people could discern higher quality sparkling wine/champagne (within reason – I’m a girl on a budget) from the less expensive stuff.
During and after dinner, everyone made tasting notes as we made our way through the offerings, then rated them from 1 to 8.
The flight offerings, all readily available at a supermarket or Bev Mo near you (depending on state):
Tasting notes became progressively more comical as the evening passed. The results were interesting if not surprising. More than 1 person rated the Freixenet as their top pick.
We had a blast, laughed till our stomachs ached and got, well, a bit drunk. At midnight, we lurched out of the house to bang pots, light off a few sparklers and smash our champagne flutes in the road (I swept up after).
I think it was 2004-2005. Was playing Pictionary with 2 friends. Then we went out to the port to watch the fireworks at midnight, and danced and drank champagne (they each had a sip or two. I drank maybe half the bottle.) We danced, and then returned back to the friend’s house to finish the Pictionary game and drink more wine. Then my friends played Jenga - I was forbidden to play it because I was too drunk and uncoordinated.
1974-75 I was at Times Square for the ball drop. Cold night. 1984-85 we were in Sausalito for the Golden Gate Bridge fireworks. Not so chilly. One year we celebrated that the New Years Eve flood hadn’t QUITE reached our front porch. Pineapple Express. Some years, visiting relatives with kids at Xmas ensured cold/flu at the new year. I forget those details because fever. Few years required intoxicated madness. Or maybe I just don’t remember those.
Very favorite: lived waaaaay in the boonies when I was a little kid. My father had built a tool shed with a flat roof, and we had a midnight picnic up there. Ate junk food, and watched fireworks from the two nearest towns, plus whatever we could see. I must have been about four.
Memorable: when I was about 12, we were at my father’s sister’s husband’s mother’s house (clear as mud, right?) One of Ms. Minnie Lee’s grandsons - a year my junior - set off one of those sparkly things that spins on the ground. Aimed it right at me. It went off next to my ankle. I still have a scar from the burn. Mark probably still has a scar from me beating him enthusiastically. (No grudges, though. Mark came and fixed my refrigerator last year.)
As an adult: announcing a kind of big NYE event (maybe 3-4000 people.) I totally blanked on the name of the band I was announcing. Made a Pink Floyd joke. It worked. Collapsed with relief. Wrote the band names on my hand immediately after!
