Let’s leave New Year’s Eve alone

I’m part of the group that starts thinking about October and despairing in November. Like almost all women, I start by asking myself whether New Year’s Eve will be family-friendly: a nice place for children, a comfortable place for older people, a place that teenagers won’t find boring, with people you and your partner have an affinity with. If I’m lucky enough to only think about you, there are other dilemmas: who will I spend it with? Places with a lot of single people can be too busy. Only married people can be too discouraged. You have to decide whether to go to a busy place without knowing if it will be busy that day. Just thinking about it makes me feel discouraged.

Good times when parents decided our New Year’s Eve. It was all fun, like attending a forbidden party. And the biggest question was “how long could we stay awake”. Then adolescence arrives and we turn back the year, but we also turn our eyes towards our parents. New Year’s Eve becomes an epic event. Today I wonder how my mother slept knowing that I was in a house in Búzios with 15 teenagers, no water, five in one room and no cell phone. Then come serious relationships, marriages, children crying for fear of fireworks, breakups, mixed families and DRs going through New Year’s Eve.

And, without warning, you go from being the drunk teenager to the person controlling the drunk teenager. We no longer dance barefoot in the sand, we distribute water. New Year’s Eve becomes bureaucratic when we stop being taken away and start taking: children, food and suitcases. And instead of dreaming or playing, you start dreaming about the end of the year just because it’s the only time to rest.

With luck, we’ll even celebrate with fireworks, controlled children, and Happy New Year messages. But this naive feeling that we can start again because someone invented a date… it goes away. There is no time. We just finished the Christmas marathon and New Year’s Eve is approaching, requiring us to buy panties that change color every year.

Jesus should have organized his birth better. It could have been written in the Bible that women cannot work on Christmas as a symbolic act because he was born of a woman. Like Orthodox Jews who do not work on Saturdays or indigenous women who, when they have their period, perform a ritual of isolation to rest.

Here in our culture, women decide on dinner, decorations, gifts and even do the cleaning afterwards. New Year’s Eve is nothing more than a break between the hidden friend and the school holidays. The thirteenth is the IPVA. The post-meal diet and preparation for the start of the school year. When everything is over, we just ask for health and that’s it.