Woo-hoo.
The 12-year-old has decided that we're serious losers, and I can kind of see her point. I don't agree with her, because to agree with her would mean to concede that it's desirable to be someplace other than home on New Year's Eve, jostling elbows with and spilling one's drink on overdressed strangers in some loud room spattered with disco lights, to which, having been there, I say a hearty no thanks this year. But when I was her age and sitting home on New Year's Eve with my parents, watching the crowds in Times Square on television who, now that I think of it, were working hard to appear to be having more fun than I was having, sitting in my den with a bowl of popcorn and three more hours before the stupid ball descended and it was next year, I too felt that things were happening elsewhere and that I was missing them.
Once, when we were home from college for the holidays, my three best high school friends and I decided to go downtown to celebrate New Year's Eve. We got ourselves all dressed up and had one friend's mother drive us down to where, we hoped, some action would be taking place. There was action taking place, in fact: food and drink and people we knew whom we hadn't seen in a long time, and we all felt festive and dressy and pretty and sparkling, until about one in the morning, when we decided it was time to call a cab and go home.
That was when the nightmare began. It was a dull nightmare, but a nightmare nonetheless. Nobody had reminded us -- and clearly we were silly enough to need reminding -- that everyone else also had been told not to drive on New Year's Eve, particularly on the going-home leg of the evening. I forget which one of us rang the first cab company, but whoever it was got a busy signal. We took it in turns, going to the phone, plunking in our quarters -- this was well before cell phones, you understand -- picking another purveyor of taxis, and listening to the busy signal.
This went on until four o'clock in the morning, by which time the four of us in our finery were prostrated on a settee in the hotel lobby which had formerly been the scene of such revelry, but which now seemed like the chilly antechamber to hell. I can't remember ever having been so tired in my life, or so desperate to be at home -- and although by then we were only ringing the cab companies about once every half-hour instead of every five minutes, still we got the busy signal. Just as we were all practically weeping with exhaustion and concluding that we never wanted to see each other again as long as we lived, one of us got through to an actual person at an actual taxi company, who said that he would send an actual taxi to fetch us.
So we went outside to wait in the cold, in our strapless Eighties cocktail dresses with the bubble skirts and our torturous high heels. There were a bunch of very wobbly-looking college men standing with us, and when a taxi appeared, all of us tried to climb in at once, and it very nearly came to blows, until one of the men came to sufficiently to make out that it was girls they were trying to shove into the gutter, and to recover the last shreds of chivalry, which he had been about to cast off forever. Anyway, we got home, but ever afterwards, whenever I have felt tempted to go out for New Year's Eve, I have thought of that night and had that much more fun washing my hair and going to bed early.
The other workable option, of course, is to have the party yourself, at your own house, so that everyone brings the fun to you, and you don't have to stir from your door. In England this was what we did, three years running -- we would have done it the last year, too, except that all the children came down with chicken pox, and inviting over everyone we knew seemed more than usually unwise. That was when we realized that other people besides us had actually had fun at our parties; a friend told me later that the Vicar had rung her up wanting to know where the party was going to be, if it wasn't at ours. "Well, it's not here," she had told him rather heartlessly.
Those parties were fun, in the way that parties that don't follow any rules often are. Unless they're disasters, that is. But we never had a disaster. Each year we followed the same simple M.O.: we printed out about a hundred slips of paper with the date of the party and our address, and also how to get to our flat, because it wasn't as easy as it sounded. You had to know to duck down the alley and buzz at the back gate, and then which back door to go into and how many flights of stairs to walk up. I think maybe we included our telephone number, but we certainly never asked anyone to RSVP, so we never knew who was coming till they came.
We asked people to bring drink, and we provided food and more drink. I never had a coherent menu, but cooked whatever occurred to me: baked brie, pear tart, gingerbread. At least once we had jambalaya and corn bread and hot wings and other things which English people don't routinely encounter at parties or anyplace else. One friend thanked me profusely for not having mulled wine and mince pies, on a steady diet of which she had been existing for well on a month, and she wasn't the only one by far. At church, whenever there was any kind of do involving food, the Vicar usually devoted a few minutes at the end of Mass for several weeks beforehand pleading for people to sign up to bring something that wasn't sausage rolls -- so I never had sausage rolls, either. Our diet becomes monotonous, too, of course, but the nice thing about being a foreigner is that your monotony isn't anyone else's monotony, so that all you have to do is bake a bunch of chicken wings with some cajun sauce slopped over them, and everyone thinks you've barbecued the quails from heaven in the desert, and tells you so, which is a nice way to begin another year.
It's nice to begin another year with thirty or so people of whom you are fond, or at least whose names you know, crowded happily in your sitting room -- people who wouldn't ordinarily be happy being crowded -- watching the fireworks on the Piece out your front windows together. One year the Christmas tree got knocked over, and one year the children and their friends, left to themselves, trashed their bedroom until it was unrecognizable as a bedroom, which was something, since "trashed" was its ordinary state of being, and one year a Radical Orthodoxy theologian came and all the children decided for some reason that he was a ghost and called him "Mr. Chicken" all evening . . .
Those were good times. Every New Year's Eve, I reflect on them. But this one isn't bad, either. The 12-year-old has retired to her room, probably to make an entire boutique's worth of twisted-wire jewelry by midnight. The 9-year-old has fallen asleep on my bed, waiting for me to come and play Nature Bingo with him. You'd think that by now he'd have seen through, "Just one more minute, let me finish this . . . " The little kids are asleep, too, having spent the evening dancing to the soundtrack from Godspell, which the 12-year-old got for Christmas, and listening to Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle stories. We read the chapter where a baby brother says, "Gogglewopshinogrits," which every child in this house, at a certain age, has thought the most hilariously funny utterance ever pronounced since the dawn of man. The 4-year-old will probably dream about it tonight, and laugh in his sleep. And when he wakes, lo, the old will have passed away, the new year come.
P.S. The former 12-year-old is celebrating her 16th birthday, which is actually next Wednesday, with three of her best friends, some pizza, a movie whose main character her younger brother has rechristened "Sergeant Soppy," and a bag of Skittles, up in the guesthouse above my mother's garage. So she at any rate will be whooping it up. The rest of us will be playing Scrabble.
Oh. And! We wish all our readers a happy and blessed 2010.
, and the author, as I discovered when I looked on Amazon, is Zilpha Keatley Snyder. And while I fully acknowledge the unreliability of my rapturous memory of this book, it seems, from the customer reviews, that I'm not the only person who felt this way about it.
