Myths and truth of New Year’s Eve: don’t push yourself before the holiday

Every day there are more and more people who are rushing around shopping centers with a crazy look, buying everything – from refrigerator magnets to fabulously expensive electronics. At the pick-up point of a well-known online store, the employee has not been seen for a long time behind piles of boxes, and the search for an order vividly resembles the excavations of ancient Troy. Traffic jams are already growing, and soon it will be impossible to get to many places at all. The picture is completed by the martyrs of “The Nutcracker,” who became famous throughout the country, ready to stand in lines for days in the cold and serve as a living reproach to those who last visited the theater in the eighth grade and best remembered the buffet.

The main thing in all this cheerful madness is this: I feel that somewhere in my subconscious a panic has settled: “I won’t make it before the New Year!” What can’t I do? Well, I won’t be able to do anything for sure.

So, returning to the precepts of the wise radio psychologist, it would be correct to immediately answer your inner panic: “Oh, okay! And I didn’t really want to!” By the way, it’s not so necessary to buy tons of food (it’s unlikely that two, three or four of us will eat five salads, a hot dish and a cake in one night). And somehow I managed to survive the previous 364 nights without caviar. Maybe we can hold out through this one too? And gifts in industrial quantities are not required. You can’t congratulate all of humanity one way or another, and you still don’t have 50 people closest to you. And it’s advisable not to start a general cleaning on December 31, if you don’t want to rub pain-relieving ointment into your lower back while the clock strikes, or just lie there without strength or desire. It seems that all this is obvious. What drives us into traffic jams, crushes, and eternal pre-holiday depression every December?

I have a suspicion. We are all taught almost from infancy: “How you celebrate the New Year is how you will spend it.” And this is such a scary pattern. That is, if you don’t clean your apartment, you’ll be kneading dirt in your own kitchen for a year, if you don’t stock up on caviar, you won’t see it for at least 12 months. Oh, and if the report is not ready at work by the end of December, you will probably never report at all.

Driven by these fears, in a mystical fear of the coming year, in which, through our own fault, there will be no food, no fun, no success in the service, we ourselves fall into pre-holiday fanaticism and put everyone around us on their ears. The bosses demand multi-volume reports from their subordinates, teachers take the shavings off students, trying to get their work done, wives nag their husbands so that “at least for the New Year” they hang up some shelves that have not yet been hung. I wouldn’t say that all this increases the percentage of happy people in the world.

So let’s figure it out: are we really spending the coming year exactly as we met it?

It seems to me that this myth comes from childhood. This is exactly the case for a prosperous child. Simply because in his wonderful world everything does not change significantly for quite a long time. I celebrated the New Year as a cute toddler and lived like that until the next one. On holidays you had trips to the Christmas tree, cheerful round dances and numerous gifts – and then there will be fun and all sorts of pleasant things. And if you were surrounded by loving adults at the end of December – and some of them even dressed up as Santa Claus, they will not go anywhere in January, May, and next winter. But if, God forbid, you are an unhappy child – abandoned or bullied, then this is a constant in your existence. And then New Year’s Eve may pass under drunken screams, and on January 1, all this horror, alas, will not dissipate.

In adult life, which for some reason goes much faster than childhood, everything turns out completely differently. I remember exactly that in my first year at university I celebrated the New Year with the guys from my group. Of course, it cannot be denied that for the next five years we continued to communicate in one way or another, but the company did not work out. And after 40 years, I am not friends at all with those classmates with whom I once listened to the chimes ringing.

There was, I remember, also a very long time ago, a New Year with Pskov friends. Just after midnight we went for a walk and for some reason—I’m ashamed to admit—we fired at a street lamp with a sports pistol. I would be nice if I spent the next year doing the same hooligan activities! But no, the night was over, so was the New Year’s recklessness, everyone returned to their business, I went to Moscow, where I didn’t do anything outrageous on the streets, and then I ended up in Pskov only many years later – I came on a business trip and, of course, didn’t break the lights.

No, perhaps, the sign “as you meet, so will you spend” has never come true. I think almost everyone has just the opposite experience. I met, for example, in a family circle, and in the coming year I got divorced; met in one city, and then lived in another; I met him, full of work plans, maybe even with colleagues, and in January he quit and changed his occupation.

What happens? Is New Year’s Eve the most ordinary, not worthy of any attention at all? I don’t agree with this either. That is, she would have been truly ordinary if we had not directed a powerful spotlight of our internal energy at her. We are so focused on it that we give it a certain phantasmagorical character. Only, I believe, the opposite pattern to the one that we have gotten into our heads operates. Not “as you meet, so will you spend,” but rather, “as you spend, so will you meet.” In my opinion, the New Year reflects, albeit not directly, not literally, the experience accumulated over 12 months, the mood formed by the end of December.

I once celebrated the New Year in the company of two of my peers (we were about thirty at the time), everyone’s personal life was not going well, and we spent almost the entire holiday night talking about our disappointments and grievances. I never saw one of these sad ladies again, I talked to the other for a short time, but I lost track of her too. That strange New Year did not foreshadow anything at all – it simply allowed us all to throw out the accumulated despondency. By the way, my personal life soon improved. I hope that my friends in misfortune do the same.

That’s what I think. If New Year’s Eve is not a prediction of the future, but simply summing up some intermediate results, isn’t it better to spend it the way you really want. Don’t turn it into either a triumph of a sense of duty (“I’ll have to go to my parents, otherwise they’ll be offended, and my aunt from Vyshny Volochok just arrived to stay”), nor into a grandiose “dust-in-the-eyes-let-off” (“yes, a restaurant this one is far away, it will be noisy and hectic there, yes, homemade food tastes better, but when my friends see my photos on VKontakte, they will burst with envy”).

You can try to arrange everything as natural for you. Let those who are happy together celebrate the New Year at home under the covers, quite satisfied with the simple menu – champagne and tangerines (by God, don’t drag herring and jellied meat under the blanket!), and those who love noisy companies will gather a crowd of guests and dance until they drop. Those who really miss them and can’t wait to see their mother’s pies with cabbage and choral performances of Soviet songs will go to their parents. And only the true fanatics of their dachas will get to the snowy Moscow region, heroically clear the path to the house, decorate a live Christmas tree and, like little children, will jump around and roll around in the snowdrifts, and then gobble up the delicacies they brought with them, because after having fun in the fresh air, they will enjoy -you really want to eat. Let the inhabitants of the kingdom of glamor drink exquisite cocktails in nightclubs, while their unglamorized relatives and colleagues stay at home watching TV. By the way, series fans have their own version of New Year’s paradise: a new season non-stop – and let the whole world wait…

However, there is one absolute exception to this detailed plan. These are our children. Or grandchildren, or nephews – the degree of relationship does not matter. Those who are three, five, seven, ten must have a magical holiday. I don’t know if it’s necessary to invite a professional Santa Claus, well-equipped, accompanied by the Snow Maiden in expensive makeup and armed with a well-thought-out script. Maybe this is a good option. But, for example, from my childhood I remember the happy fading in anticipation of a miracle when the invisible Santa Claus would quietly put gifts under the tree. And even a slight suspicion that at some point the parents tiptoed into the room and, almost without breathing, placed bags and boxes under the tree, did not in the least interfere with the atmosphere of miracle.

Childhood is the anticipation of the New Year: alluring lights outside the windows, the smell of tangerines and pies, an indispensable round dance, when the most beloved people join hands and sing in chorus, and even the dog, surprised by the general nightly excitement, dances along with everyone, joyfully whining to the beat of the polyphonic “ The Forest Raised a Christmas Tree”. Childhood is New Year’s morning, when you can look at gifts for a long time, have a late breakfast and drag half-awake adults to the nearest park. Childhood is the confidence that New Year’s Eve brings happiness – and there is no need to prepare for this in any special way. Happiness comes on its own, according to the calendar. And it would be good to remember this moment. After all, he will be greatly missed in adult life.