E-Mail This Article to a Friend Eve of destruction At a certain point, doing Jäger shots at 3:30 a.m. on New Year’s isn’t ‘going strong,’ it’s ‘a cry for help’ BY ALAN OLIFSON

The leftover turkey is waning in the fridge, reduced to a lone nub of dark meat wrapped in what is now a disproportionate amount of manhandled aluminum foil. It has become nearly impossible to justify the little pumpkins I bought for Halloween remaining scattered around the apartment. My e-mail inbox is filled with Evites for holiday parties thrown by people I haven’t spoken to in a year. All this can mean only one thing: we are through the looking glass, people — it is The Holiday Season. Yes, that magical time of year when you walk into the Gap and selflessly think, "Holy crap, aren’t there any kind of OSHA regulations regarding how many times an employee can be forced to listen to ‘Silver Bells’?"

While the days between Halloween and Thanksgiving have their own charm and rituals — like bitching about the encroachment of tinsel and cheap cardboard-cut-out reindeer — it’s not really until after Thanksgiving that we get into the full holiday swing of things. That’s when people go from decorating to festooning. And once the festooning begins, well, it’s party time.

And it’s also time for everyone’s favorite holiday ritual: What the Hell Am I Doing for New Year’s? New Year’s Eve — it starts poking its head up sometime around Halloween, a distant disco ball on the horizon. People may speak about it, but only in guarded tones: "I know it’s waaaaaaaay too early, but ..." "Don’t laugh, I’m just throwing this out there ..." But once the cranberry and stuffing are all snuggled up in their Saran-wrapped, garbage-bound containers, the gloves come off and the mad dash for required fun begins.

Personally, I’ve always had mixed feelings about New Year’s. On the one hand, I love drinking too much, kissing strangers, and little paper hats. So it seems like a natural fit. On the other hand, I hate crowded clubs filled with people I don’t know who dress better than I do. So my options are kind of limited. For starters, finding strangers you know is a tricky business. Add to this ambivalence the fact that I’m now in a committed relationship and don’t really drink like I used to. This leaves me with the paper hats. Not the best thing to anchor an evening — even if they are festooned with pictures of a guy wearing a lampshade on his head.

So these days I pretty much let New Year’s just happen to me. I guess partly it’s because I think of it more as a single person’s holiday. Sure, I love welcoming the coming year with my girlfriend, celebrating together, looking expectantly toward the future. But, come on, that’s not really something you need to start planning months in advance. We can do that on our porch. No, I think part of the allure of the Big New Year’s Party used to be the prospect of doing something unseemly with someone TBD. It was a night to head out thinking, "I have absolutely no idea how, where, or with whom this evening will end."

But those kind of nights — amazingly enough — get old. In fact, I can pinpoint exactly when those nights got old.

Lake Tahoe, 1995.

Just a few years out of college and motivated by a string of uneventful post-collegiate New Year’s Eves, my friends and I decided to plan a holiday reunion in a log cabin. It was supposed to be a pleasant getaway. Some of the guys brought their girlfriends, who, in turn, brought some of their friends. We were just supposed to hunker down against the cold, light a fire, and play some Scrabble over a nice hot toddy. Problem is, college friends can’t drink just one hot toddy. Oh, no. They’ve got to go on a hot-toddy bender. Plus, we had organized the trip months in advance, so the anticipation for a New Year’s rager had started building around Labor Day: e-mails were circulated, insults were hurled, challenges laid down. By the time the Big Night arrived, it really shouldn’t have come as a surprise when someone peed in the oven.

Though, trust me, it did.

Why in the world would someone pee in the oven? I have no idea; things spiraled out of control pretty quickly. But I do know that when you wake up on a couch covered in cheese puffs to screams of "Who the fuck peed in the oven?!", it’s time to take a long, hard look in the mirror — which is when you realize someone wrote "I’m a pussy" on your forehead. I think it was that New Year’s that we all grew up a little and realized our drinking antics might not be cute anymore — that, at a certain point, doing Jäger shots at 3:30 in the morning isn’t "going strong," it’s "a cry for help." And so, for that matter, is peeing in an oven. Thank God the women were there, or we might not have even noticed. It’s like the old philosophical conundrum: if your buddy gets drunk and pees in the oven, but a woman doesn’t discover it in the morning when she’s going to bake some banana-nut muffins, do you have a drinking problem? Well, yeah, you probably do. But will you notice?

Since that fateful evening, I haven’t worried much about what I’ll do for New Year’s Eve. This year I know I’ll be spending it with someone I love. I also know it probably won’t be the most amazing night in the world. But that’s okay. I’m learning to appreciate leaving for this over-hyped night knowing full well whom I’ll be coming home with. And I definitely appreciate waking up New Year’s Day without writing on my face, content in the knowledge that it is absolutely safe to bake banana-nut muffins in my oven.

Send New Year’s Eve Evites to Alan Olifson at alan@olifson.com.