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Bring on the Next One

Today is New Year’s Eve, and the second of my Top 3 favorite holidays is the magical combination of New Year’s Eve / New Year’s Day. I wrote back in November about the first one – Thanksgiving. And I will write about the third of my Top 3 when it arrives in 2026. But for today, I have to say I love me some New Year.

No doubt, there are some who love NYE for the booze, the partying, the dancing, the Ball Drop, the confetti and fireworks, and all the other ceremony that goes with the night. And I guess there’s nothing wrong with it, if it’s your thing. Personally, I’ve never been a huge party guy, nor a heavy drinker. Growing up, I typically watched New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with the great Dick Clark. Watch the Ball Drop, then stay up an extra hour until midnight officially occurs in the Central time zone and call it a year. As I got older, I celebrated at small gatherings at friends’ homes, but never attended the large parties you hear about.

Then on December 31, 1994, my wife (at the time, my fiancée) and I went to a NYE party at a hotel in Dallas just before we married in January 1995. It was cool – we were young and obviously excited as we rang in the year of our impending marriage in a large gathering. It was something neither of us had ever done before. In ensuing years, we attended big NYE parties a few more times, including overnight hotel stays and breakfast the next morning. Those were fun times for a newly married couple, but we’ve outgrown them. These days, with our kids (who are quintessential home-bodies), New Year’s Eve consists of a quiet night at home. We compile some finger foods and munch away while watching a movie, then turn on one of the national NYE broadcasts from New York to see coverage of the Ball Drop, which happens at 11:00pm local time. In fact, anymore we actually go to bed right afterward and don’t even stay up until midnight. The big countdown in Dallas-Fort Worth just pales in comparison to what happens in New York, so rather than stay up for an anti-climax, we just call it a year early and get that hour of sleep. Some may call us boring; I consider us smart.

We have toyed with the idea of taking a bucket-list trip to New York specifically for NYE. There are hotels in Times Square with rooftop views of the Ball Drop, and we would definitely opt for something like that instead of standing all day with 500,000 of our closest friends, hoping we don’t have to go to the bathroom too often. Sure, those hotels have to be booked years in advance, with a minimum 5-night stay at a premium price. But it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and someday we might actually do it.

All reminiscing and fantasizing aside, my love for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day comes down to two fundamental reasons. First, it’s still technically Christmas, only less stressful. See, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Christmas Day. It’s awesome as a central holiday in the year, and there is nothing quite like singing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” at Midnight Mass. I tear up literally every time. I also enjoy many things about the Holiday Season – Christmas music, lights, decorations, movies, almost all of it. But what drives me insane about Christmas is simply “the rush” during the days leading up to December 25. The rush to buy things. The rush to do things, like make this dish for that gathering, or go to this other event because it’s a tradition. The rush is always tiring, and too often it’s easy to sacrifice quality for volume. And before you know it, it’s Christmas Day, and by the night of December 25, you’re just tired. Plus there’s a major letdown because it’s over until next year, when we’ll rush, rush, rush again in hopes of buying, getting, and doing it all in preparation for another December 25.

Except Christmas isn’t actually over yet, and it took me many years to truly appreciate that. After all, there are twelve days of Christmas, right? That leads to the Epiphany and the arrival of the Three Kings. In the Catholic Church, we officially celebrate Christmastide until the Baptism of the Lord a week later. And hardcore traditionalists may even celebrate Christmas until Candlemas on February 2 and the Presentation of the Lord. Now that is some serious Christmas celebration, along with perhaps a great excuse why you still have lights on your house.

Either way, I have always enjoyed the celebration of the New Year because it’s Christmas without the proverbial baggage. You still get to enjoy the decorations, the music, the free time, and the celebration, just without all the pressure. I cannot believe that there are people who actually complain that they forget what day of the week it is between December 25 and December 31. That’s the beauty of it! The freedom to relax and simply enjoy is rare and precious. Forgetting the day of the week is affirmation that you’re experiencing such freedom.

Beyond the extension of the Christmas season, I appreciate the New Year celebration secondly because it commemorates conclusion and commencement. I’ve always been fascinated by this phenomenon. Everything has a beginning and an end – seasons, years, life itself. There’s an inherent beauty in it. Think about it: Everyone loves Opening Day of the baseball season, a beginning. Millions watch the Super Bowl, an ending. We tune into the season finale or series finale of our favorite shows.  We’re excited about the beginning of a particular season, and we have bittersweet feelings at its conclusion – yet we also cherish the memories and lessons of the experience. We rejoice when babies are born, and when someone dies, we honor their memory at least one more time as we grieve. These are all beautiful things.

I suspect my own admiration for beginnings and endings could be why I gravitated toward education as a career. It’s certainly something I enjoyed about it. The first day of school is exciting. The last day of school, even more so. Everybody is happy on graduation day. Surely one of the greatest things about a school year is that it begins and ends, and the rhythm of that process is fulfilling. I also think, for a lot of people, the never-ending quality of a job outside of education is one of the things that makes it awful. Some jobs never seem to have an end. And let’s face it, the term “fiscal year,” and the concept of it, is hardly exciting or fulfilling for the average worker.

But the calendar year? You almost have to love it. I do. I love how the end of a given year brings retrospectives – about the events of the past 12 months, the lives that were lost, the lives that began, and the lives that changed, grew, and prospered. For me, 2025 brought significant changes – I’ve already outlined many of those in a previous post. I lost a couple of friends this year – one suddenly, one after an extended illness. But I’ve also met new friends and strengthened connections to old ones. I don’t feel the need to detail everything or offer a lot of personal description. The point of this post is that, for all of us, the chance to close the metaphorical book, the ability to reflect on it all at this time of year is, in a word, wonderful.

Also wonderful? Hope for the coming year. But I’m not necessarily talking about typical New Year’s Resolutions. Too often, those resolutions are outcome based – “I’m going to lose 20 pounds,” “I’m going to make more money,” etc. Outcome-based goals often sound nice, but they’re actually kind of a trap. The truth is that you and I have no idea what outcome we can achieve, nor do we know specifically how we’ll get there, or even if we will. Outcomes are affected by many factors over which we have zero control. I found outcome-driven goals to be a complete waste of time in my education career because of the lack of control over the student population. Outcomes are every bit as useless when developing New Year’s Resolutions. 

But what is useful in setting goals is the practice of deciding to adjust that which we can control. In deciding New Year’s Resolutions, we absolutely know which behaviors we can correct, or at least adjust, going forward. I have a personal, modest list of New Year’s Resolutions. Although I’m not going to delineate those in this space – because you, the reader, probably don’t care that much about what I plan to work on in 2026 – I can definitely say that they will be things over which I have direct influence. And as such, adjusting these behaviors should directly impact me.

What’s the most important aspect of these resolutions? They’re daily. Sure, maybe you want to achieve a certain milestone by the midpoint of the year, June 30, but the real journey to get there begins on January 1. And continues on January 2, January 3, and so on until you finally reach June 30 and beyond. That’s the real challenge – crafting New Year’s Resolutions that allow you to wake up each morning and reiterate, “Today I’m going to…,” and more importantly, do it. It takes patience. It takes time. It takes persistence. Whatever the resolution, it takes the will to avoid whatever behavior you’re leaving behind and replacing it with whatever behavior you seek to pursue, to reinforce, to feed. And what you feed, grows.

The daily nature of effective New Year’s Resolutions is, honestly, what makes them a little ironic, and why so many people establish ineffective resolutions. We experience a huge build-up to the Holiday Season, it culminates with New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, and then we embark on the coming year. And we’ll do it all again in just under 12 months. So it’s natural that the plans we make for each year are grand, not minor and routine. Yet the grandeur is precisely what makes them fruitless. It’s like pretending you can eat a giant meal in just a few minutes, thinking you can read a long book in the next hour, attempting to writing a term paper in one afternoon, or cramming for a final exam when you’ve skipped class all semester. It’s also probably why, in recent years, I lament to my wife that everybody makes a huge deal out of “ringing in the new year,” but they don’t think anything of it when the clock strikes midnight on a random Tuesday in August. Obviously, each new year can feel like a gift, but why don’t we treat each day with the same gratitude?

And yet, despite the irony, I really love the sentiment of closure and renewal that each New Year’s celebration brings. Not because the vast majority of people will make extravagant plans for the coming year that they will abandon before the end of February, but because it serves as an excellent marker in life. That marker is a perfect point for cataloging where the last 365 days went right and wrong, then deciding the daily habits to begin, re-establish, or reinforce for the coming 365 days. Whatever your plans for 2026, I wish you a safe, fun New Year’s Eve, and as The Christmas Waltz says, “May your New Year dreams come true.” Here’s hoping you’re able to persist peacefully and productively in making them happen.

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Ode to Black Friday

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and I am particularly thankful for many things this year, as I posted yesterday. This morning, I resumed my daily ritual of morning walks/runs that I’ve adopted to improve my health. Typically, I head to one of the many lovely parks provided by the City of Arlington, and on my way this morning, I drove by a couple of retailers whose parking lots were populated with more cars than usual for that time of day. And something occurred to me that hadn’t resonated for many years: It’s Black Friday!

No, not the 1869 financial crisis. (He said, knowing most people wouldn’t be aware of any such event.) And not even the term from Philadelphia in the 1950s. (Feel free to look that one up, too.) I speak, of course, of the Day After Thanksgiving, when retailers like to pretend their accounting books go from the red (taking losses) into the black (making profits) thanks to the surge in holiday shopping. Because now that Thanksgiving is over, it’s time to gear up for Christmas. Commence the Christmas shopping.

A little personal history here: I grew up in a household that was very much built on a foundation of paper – books, magazines, and more than one daily newspaper. So I read a lot, although I will freely admit that I was more devoted to the periodicals than I was the books. I suspect it’s the part of me that decided to major in history in college; after all, newspapers and magazines that document what’s happening around us each day will become primary sources of historical knowledge in the future. I just know I preferred them.

Sundays, as it turned out, weren’t just for Mass. They also included the ritual of the Sunday paper. (And we had TWO!) If you recall, the Sunday newspaper in its heyday was packed. There were stories that had been built over the course of the week by the staff, additional features, additional opinions, more reader letters, and of course, ads. Lots and lots of ads, because retailers would publish their specials weekly. Now, as retailers began adopting Black Friday as a positive marketing tactic in the 1980s, the newspaper on Thanksgiving began to grow. Black Friday specials, and hence, more ads. The trend continued into the 1990s, and its growth was fairly organic. The “holiday doorbuster” came about, where a store that normally opened at 10:00am would open as early as 9:00, or even 8:00, or *gasp* 7:00am on the day after Thanksgiving. And they would feature limited-time specials that would expire at or shortly after the normal opening time. The idea, naturally, was to get you into the store earlier than normal, knowing that a given special might draw you, but you would still shop for additional items to get your Christmas shopping done. It was a classic marketing tactic, even if the special itself was a loss leader.

And I will freely admit, I loved it. There was something really cool about checking out the ads in the paper sometime on Thanksgiving Day (for me, usually after food and football), then getting up early on the day after Thanksgiving to shop a little. It was a neat break in the routine that said “It’s the Holidays.” I fondly remember 1996, when I headed to Kay-Bee Toys at The Parks at Arlington with my new sister-in-law so that I could get some cool toys for my niece and nephews on their doorbuster specials. Call me a sucker; I don’t care. I genuinely enjoyed it. I woke up at 6:00am to get to the mall by 7:00am for an 8:00am opening. There were perhaps 50 people waiting outside the store that morning, and everyone was actually very chill about what they wanted. No running, no stampeding, no yelling, no complaining. The employees didn’t seem to mind, either, since they only had to arrive a couple of hours earlier than normal. It was genuinely a fun experience. And these experiences remained fun for several years.

And then they killed it. The opening time kept getting earlier and earlier. Eventually, retailers started opening at midnight. The specials started getting more ridiculous in that they were much cheaper, but severely limited. That really only invites the madness, the running, the stampeding, the fighting, the complaining. The fun of Black Friday dissipated for me. I knew I was definitely done with it the year my in-laws camped out overnight outside Best Buy for the chance at a laptop for $500. A 6:00am wake-up during a holiday is fine, but I’m not sitting awake all night in the cold just to save some money. What’s worse is that the retailers started working with manufacturers to create specific Black Friday merchandise. You were no longer getting a normal item at a remarkable price; you were getting a once-only item that was created cheaply to sell to you cheap. Not the same.

Now, I realize that Frank Costanza created Festivus in 1997 in response to retail madness, and that was during the time when I still enjoyed Black Friday. I will admit that I never worked hard to get the specific hot toy of the year – no Cabbage Patch Kids or Tickle Me Elmo. I suppose that my experience might have been different if I was diving deep into Black Friday shopping instead of just dipping my toes.  I was at Kay-Bee instead of Toys R Us, where it probably was crazier. I might stop at Target, but never Walmart. I’m certain there are some people out there who worked retail in the 1990s, hated Black Friday back then, and think I’m insane for saying I used to enjoy it. That’s fair, and my perspective is no doubt framed by my personal experience. But the bottom line for me is that, as is often the case in the USA, marketers and retailers decided to take things past the point of diminishing returns. Too much of a good thing. Kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

Remember when Target, Walmart, and other stores actually opened on Thanksgiving Day? I can think of only one good thing about those days. My oldest, who has autism, would always be really wound up after spending Thanksgiving at two different houses with extended family from both his parents. So the ability to take him out to Grand Prairie Premium Outlets at 8:00pm on Thanksgiving so that he could walk with his father and release some energy was valuable. But I also recall feeling really terrible for the employees who had to leave their own families early that day to go to work. And I wondered about the benefits for the shoppers. Was it really worth it to go out on Thanksgiving Day to acquire more stuff?

Mercifully, those days are now behind us. But along the way, Black Friday has gone from an organic, interesting (and perhaps maddening) retail phenomenon to yet another contrived concoction of American advertisers. After the advent of Cyber Monday for online retailers, the actual concept of Black Friday has morphed into essentially a weeks-long festival of discounts online and in-store. If I had a nickel for every time I see “Black Friday Starts NOW” in my e-mail, I probably wouldn’t need to worry about saving any money on their special deals. The fact that retailers are willing to give us 15-30% off everything for a week or more is basically an admission that they’re inflating their margins most of the year. And instead of lower prices consistently feeding a stable retail environment that survives, if not thrives, we get inflated prices for much of the year with brief periods of unbridled spending, insane traffic, long lines, massive crowds, and a generally miserable experience.

And then there’s Small Business Saturday, “brought to you by American Express.” It was started in 2010 as a purported effort to support smaller stores who were harmed by the 2008 financial crisis. And while it seems like a well-meaning concept (because who thinks it’s a bad idea to help small business?), it is bitterly ironic that American Express is involved. Ask any small business owner, and they’ll freely tell you they cannot afford to accept American Express because the transaction fees for sellers are higher than nearly every other card. But then, irony in the USA appears to have quietly died many years ago, so who knows?

So Black Friday used to appeal to me, but it’s grown tiresome and I now actively seek to avoid it. And yet, I take heart in this development. My children are now grown, and their association with Christmas has evolved such that they value experiences and the spirit of the season far more than they do the quantity of presents under the tree. So we spend more of this season going out to see lights, watching movies, and of course, participating in Mass and other church activities. We still exchange a modest number of gifts among our family each Christmas, but we really have moved on from the consumer-driven aspects of the holiday. It’s refreshing. Meanwhile, I will always have my romanticized memories of a gentler time in American retail. And I will tip my hat to stores like REI, which closes on Black Friday for their “Opt Outside” initiative – they encourage everyone to avoid shopping and pursue an outdoor activity after all the food from Thursday. They even give their employees a paid day off to do the same. Sounds like a plan to me.