How was your New Year's Eve?

If you didn't have much fun celebrating last night, you may not be alone. I've never met anybody who didn't agree that the passing of the year is the most dismal of all holidays. It's an article of faith that suicide rates skyrocket during the holiday season, but while we're all pointing fingers at the pressure cooker of Christmas, nobody ever mentions that the season also includes a day of despairing, late-Weimar conviviality, signifying nothing and climaxing (inconveniently, at midnight, when the evening is neither starting up nor winding down) with that most apocalyptic of activities - a countdown. Christmas may hurt, but it's New Year's that really kills you.

Compare and contrast New Year's Eve with our other favorite holidays: Easter marks a resurrection, and comes in the spring, with a garland of bunnies and candy; Christmas exists as an appeal to the better angels of our natures; Yom Kippur marks atonement, and the clean slate that comes with us; the dual impulses of Americans - pious rest after labor and piggish, explosive exuberance - come to the fore, respectively, in Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July; for all the tut-tutting about remembering our war dead and labor strife, Memorial and Labor Days are just freeby days off.

But New Year's marks nothing but the fact that time has passed. It is an occasion for, at best, wistfulness, and at worst depression. Is "Auld Lang Syne" not a shameless tearjerker? The promise of a fresh start in the New Year is honored only through the Resolution - usually punitive in nature and always broken before January is through. The most fitting emotional responses to New Year's are exhaustion at the end of the holiday season, and horror at the return to work.

So if your New Year's sucked, don't blame yourself or your hosts. It's a good-for-nothing day. Thank God it's over.

Happy New Year. Good luck in 1998.