With 2020 coming to an end, people are happily biding adieu this troublesome year which only brought sickness and sadness with it. While no one is in a mood to party this New Year’s Eve they are letting go the cursed year with some perilous rituals, reports the Guardian.
Let’s look at what people are upto this New Year’s Eve.
The New Normal New Year’s Eve
In many ways, the end of this terrible year deserves the biggest, loudest and most cathartic party of all time. In a pandemic, of course, that was never going to happen – but it seems to be the last thing many want to do anyway.
When asked how they’d be marking New Year’s Eve – amid Covid restrictions, bad weather and general 2020 exhaustion – many people on Twitter shared the same sentiment: they would not be doing much. One is looking forward to “a quiet night with my dogs”; another a “rousing boardgame”; a third replied: “glass of wine, bed early.”
After five and a half months in Melbourne’s lockdown, Cora Roberts plans to “see the new year in as I have spent most of it: on the couch, with a martini”; Charlotte Roberts is “not a drinker, but will be having many sweets”.
I’m going to sleep through it!
— Gemma Killen (@gemkillen) December 29, 2020
Maybe a quiet night in is what we all need right now – or maybe there’s a better way. The broadcaster and screenwriter Marieke Hardy will be continuing a tradition she’s kept for five years: “Writing a goodbye/reflection letter to the year that was and setting it on fire at midnight,” she says, as well as setting intentions for the next year. “There will also be cocktails and sequins.”
Weird New Year’s Eve Rituals
- burping & burying the year
The comedian Demi Lardner has her own plans:
im going to burp into a jar and bury it in the park
— demy (@DemiLardner) December 29, 2020
- First Dog on the Moon Sobbing
Here in the wilds of southern Tasmania, New Year’s Eve at the First Dog on the Moon Institute is normally a sparkling joyous affair. We don our finest frocks and traipse down the long paddock to the big gully near the dam, there under the silver wattles and the blue gums is a grassy mossy spot where the pademelons frolic and wallabies tango through the bracken. We all have a lovely time dancing until the morning mist comes.
However not this year – everyone is simply too worn out from Covid and climate change and all the other wretchedness of 2020 nobody has any zing in any of their things. New Year’s Eve 2021 will find the crew of the good ship First Dog on the Moon Institute dressed in our glamorous summer pyjamas lying on the parquetry and sobbing while our coven of meticulously trained border collies brings us laudanum spritzers and tray after tray of delicious little cakes. Hopefully 2021 will hold something different for us all.
KFC, garlands and sparklers
I infamously used to be wild child but with all the poisons in the world could just never manage a good New Year’s Eve. Maybe because expectations were always too high: whether it was a party in an apartment on Sydney Harbour or a piss-up with friends in a suburban backyard, I always felt trapped in something loud and kind of messy. My partner is also a reformed character and similarly has tales to tell of shitty NYEs caught in crowds, stumbling around in lieu of having a good time.
So we have a wilfully low-key NYE. It involves just the two of us. We drive up to the servo early, and get a bucket of KFC. We come back to our house and – under Christmas lights that we keep up specifically for this purpose – we hose our balcony. All the detritus of the year is washed away. Then we put garlands on our heads, light sparklers, listen to the countdown and take a couple of seconds to hear the cheer go up in the air above our little country town. We do indulge an annual bacchanal but that’s come to be Burn’s Night (25 January) where haggis, swords, kilts, Buckfast and our friends hollering poetry in Scots furnish a more appropriately theatrical start to the year.
Get Dressed for A Temperature Check?
Elle Hunt takes part in a seasonal solo Christmas shoot while quarantining in Auckland
I will be spending New Year’s Eve alone in a hotel room under army supervision, on my ninth day in hotel quarantine in Auckland. I don’t know what I will have eaten because I can’t remember what I put down when I was given the form a week ago. I hope it’s nice.
At least I had the presence of mind to order a bottle of cava from the supermarket. It has spent the past week at reception, where it and my two other bottles of wine were intercepted on delivery lest I feel inclined to drink them all in one go. Merely picking it up felt like getting into the festive spirit.
Will I get dressed up? Probably not. I would feel silly putting on a dress for my daily temperature check. It should have already gone without saying that a new year’s pash is out of the question (and would lead, as I understand it, to an extension of my quarantine and potentially charges).
I intend to call my friends back in London – my midnight will be their mid-morning, which is not to say they won’t have started drinking. Eventually, I suppose, I will call my parents: the only people I know to have a quieter night planned than I do. Well, I assume. I hope.
No Cooking New Year’s Eve
I gave birth to my second son this year so I cannot call 2020 a bin fire. Parts were difficult, yes, but I have plenty to be thankful for including the health of all the nurses in my family.
On New Year’s Eve I’ll be toasting the back of 2020 with proper champagne and a few of my closest mates at my house. We’ll be dining on a menu I design but do not cook, as is my usual custom, and we will be entering 2021 with hope and some trepidation.
Celebrating the Community
Brigid Delaney: a do-over, with different results
New Year’s Eve going into 2020, and it all seemed to be falling apart before 9pm – some had gotten sick, some had gone home, but those who remained went to the pub and joined the table of a group of strangers. The night improved and as midnight came and went we shared our hopes for 2020 – in one word only. “Vitality” was mine: I wanted a high-energy year when I was consistently feeling great. One of the blokes we’d met nominated “community”: he wanted to connect with those around him.
That night they were evacuating the beaches up the coast as a fire front moved in. Smoke hung over the cities. But 2020 – the pleasing roundness and symmetry of the numbers – would surely herald good things. The vibe was optimistic.
I became friends with those guys at the pub and in February even sublet an apartment from one of them. We were working on our 2020 words – and then all hell broke loose in March. The resolutions – community, vitality – became ash on our tongues; a cosmic joke with the punchline being isolation and fatigue.
This New Year’s Eve I’m meeting up with the Melbourne blokes again. Same pub, same country town – but less certain this year about the words that we’ll use.
Mourning Bushfire Victims
Mike Bowers: I’ll be thinking of the bushfire victims
“GO GO GO GO GO!”
Although the officer was 100 metres away, and being drowned out by the roar of the fire, I could clearly hear the desperate urgency in his commands. I had come to recognise it in others that summer: when the flames threaten to overwhelm, the voice gets a pleading and desperate quality, the words tumbling out and overlapping each other trying to get out of the mouth. I would unfortunately hear that tone many more times before the savage summer of 2019-20 was finished with us.
Reminiscing an Angry Fire
‘I had forgotten it was New Year’s Eve’: this time last year, Guardian Australia photographer Mike Bowers was covering the Currowan fire on the south coast of NSW.
I had been waiting at a roadblock south of Nowra on the New South Wales south coast for about an hour when the fire exploded out of the bush. A strong wind from the north west was driving it forward and it seemed to catch everyone by surprise. An RFS firefighter later called it an “angry fire” and I could feel the percussion of the blaze through my feet as the road rumbled; the flames were crowning through the treetops and it made a noise like a 747 landing with reverse thrust engaged. The view of this spectacular scene was being interrupted through my viewfinder as the mirror flipped up between frames. I remember thinking how small the police car looked framed up with the flames exploding in the trees behind it; I was racking the exposure down to accommodate for the brightness, the mundane processes involved in photography keep me calm in moments of high stress.
Not long after that, the day turned into an apocalyptic shade of orange then went completely dark and I covered the fire as it devastated properties along the road to the seaside. I had forgotten it was New Year’s Eve by the time the wind dropped and the fire became less angry.
I am on the south coast again this year, further south at Bawley Point, holidaying with my family. I hope to spend most of this New Year’s Eve watching TV – and hopefully no one will have that urgent and desperate tone in their voice. It’s a world away from last year but I am very aware that for some who lost everything this will be a difficult anniversary. I photographed many of the victims this year, following their story of rebuilding and survival. I will be thinking of them too.
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Source: The Guardian
