New Year’s Eve Numbskullery

Here's A Plan For Kicking Off The New Year With a Bang-Up Good Time

In 1947, pop and country music artist Margaret Eleanor Whiting was the first to record Frank Loesser’s song “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” Loesser also wrote “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” a now-controversial duet recorded by Whiting and Johnny Mercer in 1949. Those are just fun facts having zero to do with this “Last Laugh” installment.

Let’s talk New Year’s Eve, AKA the annual celebration where Americans get together, wear funny hats and repeatedly tell each other, “I hate New Year’s Eve.” I’m not sure exactly why so many people dislike New Year’s, but if I had to guess, they either a) have a secret fear of counting backward or b) realize at some point in the night they’ll have to listen to Kathy Griffin. Both of these are more than fair complaints but don’t really rate the kind of national vitriol usually reserved for Taylor Swift cutaways.

Maybe the problem is that the United States doesn’t have any great New Year’s Eve traditions other than binge drinking, a tradition we also use to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving and kindergarten graduations. So, in order to foster a little more high-octane excitement around our annual Anderson Cooper giggling with Andy Cohen marathon on CNN, perhaps we can look at some other countries and gain inspiration from how they celebrate New Year’s Eve.

In Germany, for example, revelers ring in the new year by melting lead over cold water. Legend has it that whatever shape the lead makes tells your fortune for the new year, which usually includes lead poisoning and early-onset dementia.

In Spain and much of Latin America, people will eat 12 grapes at midnight, one for each stroke of the clock. You may remember this tradition from the guy you knew in college who studied abroad for a semester and kept saying, “This is what they do in Bar-THE-lona!”

In Naples, Italians celebrate by throwing their furniture out the window to get rid of bad spirits, who apparently prefer to live inside couch upholstery instead of the cushy world of the spirit realm. On New Year’s Day, Italians will greet each other by saying, “Buon Anno!” which loosely translates to, “I feel like I got hit in the head with a couch.”

The Danish mark the change of the calendar by grabbing a caseload of ceramic plates, walking next door and smashing them against their neighbors’ houses. This tradition was said to be the actual inspiration for Jason Aldean’s “Try That In A Small Town.”

The Irish are a little nicer to their homes, opting to smack their walls with loaves of bread instead of perfectly good dishware. Another Irish ritual involves single women putting mistletoe under their pillows in hopes of finding love in the new year. Married Irish women have their own New Year’s tradition, colloquially known as “childbirth.”

Another interesting tradition comes to us from Mexico, where people walk around with empty suitcases in hopes of finding travel adventures in the new year. Since 2009, Fox News has had its own tradition of mistaking this for an immigrant caravan.

Estonians will feast seven, nine or 12 times on New Year’s Eve, all of which are considered “lucky” numbers. Mostly by Estonian bariatricians whose business not-at-all-suspiciously triples in January.

Finally, the most disturbing New Year’s tradition comes from the Netherlands. It involves the Dutch Goddess Perchta, who likes to spend her New Year’s Eve as a sort of ultra-violent fun police, cutting open the stomachs of anyone who isn’t celebrating hard enough. To ward her off, people do what any sensible person would to repel an eviscerating goddess—they eat doughnuts. That’s a practice we might want to try in hopes of warding off Kathy Griffin.