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         With Christmas just passed, and New Year’s eve coming up, we can experience awful anxiety. Geez, what am I going to do? How am I going to get through this? At whose house should I be? At what celebration and where? OMG, I don’t have a date. I haven’t been invited anywhere and the days are racing by.

           The New Year’s Eve balloon 2025 is about to drop at Times Square! There is so much pressure to spend holidays, especially this big one with family or friends.

           Think you might be alone? Then plan to do something small and inspiring for yourself at home. For if you chase after being with others, it could cause you to be very uninspired indeed.

          I learned my lesson about this the hard way when I was a 13 year old pubescent girl. New Year’s Eve of 1963. No boy had asked me out. No party giver had invited me.

         Social customs made me think I was going to be very miserable indeed if I didn’t do something memorable. I decided to spend the evening at my Aunt’s apartment in Queen above the soda fountain, and candy store she and my uncle ran.   

        The problem was their daughter, a few years older than me, was out on a date. Their son lived out of town.

         So I found myself facing what I had escaped from. A dreaded state of loneliness, displaced  in Queens, craving to do something in celebration of the New Year. Something outlandish. Something I could brag about when my peers asked, “what did you do on New Year’s Eve? 

         Then I got an idea. After my aunt and uncle fell asleep,  I snuck down into their candy store.

         Behind the cash register were racks where they displayed cigarettes to sell. I, who had never smoked before, grabbed a pack of menthol Kool and with awkward fingers lit up. I wasn’t sure how to bring in the burning tobacco into my lungs or where to exhale the smoke.  I dragged deeply and a fit of coughing came which sent me staggering out to the sidewalk so as not to wake my aunt and uncle.

          I choked and smoked the cigarette. Till my throat burned and my eyes shed tears. The aftertaste was misery compounded. Not only of tobacco and menthol.  I did something which was bad for me and for my relatives.  I stole a pack from them.

      Sixty-one years later, with New Year Eve approaching, I ask myself what could I have done that was good for a 13 year old afraid of facing the New Year alone? The same as I would do now. I would curl up with a wonderful book by a fire and a warm cup of cider or eggnog.   

      With your pet if you have one. And if not, just with your dear old self and a beloved author as companion.