Well, here it is, another New Year’s Eve…WTF! I’ve never been all that sentimental about New Year’s. Calendar dating is so arbitrary. Astrological dates and moon phases mean a lot more to me, and even then, I adjust all the times for my exact longitude, meaning that I subtract 12 minutes from standard time. I’ve never done much to celebrate New Year’s (I hear my neighbors setting off fireworks, though–I like doing that! I didn’t get any, although I did think about it). I worked nearly every New Year’s Eve at the shelter, including Y2K, when no one but me even thought to lay in some emergency supplies in case of glitches, and one of the shelter guests was calmly predicting that civilization was going to come to a crashing halt at midnight.
Several New Years in a row, my supervisor had me do elaborate “rituals” on New Year’s. I’m not entirely sure what her motives were, and I didn’t enjoy doing them that much, as I felt that the rituals were being imposed on the shelter guests. But my supervisor decorated the big common room over in “the barn” very elaborately (to the point of eliciting gasps from the guests), and I cooked up various ceremonial things to do around “releasing the old and welcoming the new.” I also took my Tarot cards in and gave the guests free Tarot readings, if they wanted them. The ladies who participated in the “rituals” enjoyed them very much, but one year we nearly had a riot in the house when one guest and her kids abstained from the “ritual” and proceeded to eat an entire party platter of shrimp while the rest of us were engaged. Another year, I decided to give each guest a real gold dollar coin at my own expense, polished and consecrated, as my special gift. That was a hit! 🙂
That same year, my supervisor asked one guest to bake a “King Cake” for Twelfth Night. The guest failed to follow through and I baked it. The recipe was a very rich sweet bread dough (and I love baking yeast dough) with sour cream. But the “King Cake” traditionally has charms or trinkets baked into it for good luck. I didn’t have anything like that, but I had a few of the gold coins left. So, I decided to bake those, thoroughly washed, into the King Cake. But then, because I didn’t want anyone to choke or break a tooth, I told the guests that the coins were in the cake (which was huge, by the way!). Well…can you guess what ended up happening to the cake? *wry smile* I only learned later that the King Cake has traditional colors of frosting and decorations, which is too bad, because it was tons of fun to bake, and it would have been even more dramatic with purple and gold icing.
One New Year’s Eve, pre-rituals, I was sitting with several of the shelter guests watching the TV as the ball went down, and at the stroke of midnight, one of the guests leaped from her chair, ran to the front door, pulled it open, ducked outside, tossed something in through the door and came back in. As we sat staring, she said, “oh, you never heard about this?” She told us that if you put some money under the outside doormat and threw it into the house at midnight on New Year’s Eve, you’ll have money coming in all through the year. I’d never heard that one! I have to admit, I never tried it–mostly because I never remember, but also because if I put something under the doormat early in the day, by midnight the mat would be frozen to the stoop, and I wouldn’t be able to get the money out, and that would be terribly bad luck, so…let’s not go there!
While 2007 has had a few memorable milestones, such as publishing Mortal Touch, for the most part it’s been a rough year. Good bye and good riddance! I am not going to tempt the Fates by saying what I said last New Year’s Eve. Hope everyone is having a peaceful and pleasant evening! I treated my dad to The Golden Compass earlier tonight, and that was a most enjoyable way to mark the day. We loved it.
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