Why I Don't Like New Year

I don't like New Year.

No, that's not quite right.

New Year is not my holiday.

I formulated this conclusion and managed to admit this frightening discovery to myself only this year.

I used to think the problem was with me.

As a child, New Year always left an aftertaste of disappointment, and instead of a festive mood, it brought on melancholy and depression. Probably every child waits for two days a year: New Year's and their birthday.

The mass media, marketers and Hollywood elevate New Year to the level of a cult, and so you yourself wait for a festive tree, Ded Moroz, gifts in holiday wrapping and a festive mood. Frank Sinatra plays from the speakers, and on TV they show Home Alone: you couldn't come up with a sweeter family comedy. In the end, the day arrives and... it's just like any other day.

A crisis of inflated expectations meeting reality.

Everyone greets New Year as they wish (and, frankly, all the stock versions sound unappealing): someone spends the whole day standing in line at the store, cooks dishes in the kitchen so as to watch the president's address at midnight, and overeats at the New Year's table with family.

Someone starts looking for apartments and country houses half a year in advance, so as to gather with friends and get drunk to the point of losing any sense of space and time.

Others take advantage of two-week holidays, go on a New Year's vacation and travel abroad, heading to warm places to greet New Year as far away from their own kind as possible. 

During the "hungry student years," the latter annoyed me especially: go ride around your Europes, with happy faces on Instagram (it's clear that it wasn't the people who annoyed me, but the "hungry student years").

And so December 31 ends, it's January 1, you wake up around noon (hello, disrupted sleep schedule), there are 365 days until the next New Year, and in the meantime you have to wash the dishes from the New Year's table, and in the evening finish what's left from yesterday. A bowl of Olivier salad becomes breakfast, lunch and dinner for the next several days.

And is this really a holiday?!

The particular discomfort is the gifts for New Year. 

Anyone who knows me well will confirm: I am a person who ADORES giving gifts. It brings me endless joy. I like making people happy. Perhaps it's even my life's purpose, because almost the main incentive for me to earn more money is the ability to give more: I don't know why this is, but it's a good topic for a conversation with a psychologist.

However, when giving gifts is forced on you not by desire and mood but by a SCHEDULE on the calendar, everyone urgently has to come up with something, organize, spend time, buy and, of course, wrap the gift (after standing in yet another kilometer-long line for gift wrapping), while at the stores crowds of queues of the same Ded Morozes pile up at every checkout. The most pleasant process turns into a real torture.

And what about those people to whom you don't want to give gifts, but you'll have to? Give them just so as not to offend and force a smile? A fake holiday!

But what I dislike most about New Year is that the world around us comes to a standstill.

"Let's do it after the holidays," "we'll come back to this after New Year" and a hundred other variations of these phrases, which we start hearing as early as November. They slow down work, business and projects, most often for absolutely no reason. What the hell?!

Everyone chooses for themselves how to live and how to celebrate holidays. For me, true freedom lies in throwing parties and giving gifts when the mood calls for it, not when a routine date on the calendar demands it.

I don't like New Year. 

And I'm glad I admitted it to myself.