After Christmas, Artificial New Year's Eve

Another Christmas is over. I find it kind of sad when Christmas ends. It's a genuine celebration in which people try to be kinder and more gentle toward others. That's probably why we westerners don't care as much for the New Year's Eve routine as do Asians, Mid easterners, and Africans. New Year's Eve is anti climactic for many of us, a disappointing almost phony day to "change the calendar". Does anyone really think that the arbitrary "New Year" day is different from the last day of the previous calendar year? Why that diapered Baby New Year symbol looks more ridiculous and less possible than even the images of Santa.

As an adult I never did celebrate New Year's Eve. It's too many people trying too hard to have fun about an event they know is not real, but that has been created by advertisers and commercial businesses. It's bad enough that the drunks are encouraged to drink until they can't see anymore (all the while driving their automobiles and killing the sober people who happened to be in their a way), but the amateur drinkers come out to cause even more damage to society. Nothing is worse and more unpleasant than a non drinker on New Year's Eve who thinks he or she has to drink alcohol to the point of inebriation. Someone should spike their whiskey with milk.

My only good remembrances of New Year's holiday was those that happened when I was a child. We used to shoot fireworks all week and on New Year's Eve night. We weren't celebrating, we were blowing things up with our heavy duty fireworks and having a lot of fun doing do. Once as an 11 year old, a handful of bottle rockets ignited while I held them in my hand (a "punk", the tall sticks we used to light our firecrackers that I held in my other hand somehow touched the ignition on one of the rockets and set them all off). I merely ran inside, treated the burns and within an hour was shooting them again.

New Year's was nothing more for we kids than a time to shoot fireworks. Today's kids don't have the opportunity to shoot them as we did because the grown-ups have banned them in many places in the U.S., on the grounds that they are too dangerous. Ironic, huh? The same grownups who drink themselves sick and who kill and main so many others with their vehicles New Year's Eve because of it, have decided to legislate fireworks and not their much more dangerous alcohol.
So this New Year's Eve I will stay at home, away from that celebration without a cause and the carnage that follows. May your 2013 be a safe and happy one beginning New Year's Day.