This New Year’s Eve will mark roughly our 25th anniversary of being sound asleep while much of the rest of the world is out partying like it’s an Olympic event.

When it comes to partying and drinking, I’ve long considered New Year’s Eve to be amateur night, and we don’t mind in the least that we’ve missed so many of them. While others wake up with the hangover from hell, we get our normal hours of sleep and wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed the next morning.

Well… she does. I just wake up.

In other words, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are just another couple of perfectly normal days for us. I don’t follow college football, so whatever bowl games are on are a complete non-issue. Fireworks, crowds, countdowns, noise horns — we’ll take a warm bed and silence every time.

Since I had nothing better to do (having been sober and in bed long before midnight for a quarter century), I did a little research on New Year’s Eve and uncovered a few facts you can use to dazzle your drinking companions.

It turns out that until 1979, America was both the first and the last to see in the New Year.

The first inhabited place on Earth to ring in the New Year is the Line Islands — specifically Christmas Island, known officially as Kiritimati. It belongs to a country most people have never heard of, Kiribati, and has a population of about 8,000 people sitting quietly in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. For years it was claimed by the United States under the Guano Act of 1856 (which already sounds like a bad idea), before eventually becoming part of an independent nation.

The last place to see the New Year is American Samoa, also in the Pacific, just west of the International Date Line.

So this raises an important question: If someone left Kiritimati just after midnight on New Year’s Eve and flew to American Samoa, arriving just before midnight… would they gain a day, lose a day, or — like me — simply forget what happened altogether?

People have been getting inebriated on New Year’s Eve for at least 4,000 years, which means it probably started when King Sūmû-abum of ancient Mesopotamia got rip-snorting drunk, made a pass at a chamber maid, and was promptly clobbered by his wife. Some traditions truly are timeless.

Like most holidays, New Year’s Eve also has pagan roots. Julius Caesar decreed that the new year would begin on January 1st in honor of Janus, the Roman god who could see the past, present, and future. An impressive skill — especially when you consider that we now have two-faced people in politics who can’t see past power and taxpayer money.
(Think, JB Pritzker.)

One final useless fact before I let you return to your champagne: In some countries, underwear plays a significant role in New Year’s Eve rituals. In parts of Latin America, the color of your underwear supposedly determines the coming year — blue for health, red for love. Italians also swear by red underwear for good luck.

Oddly, no one seems to have addressed black Tommy John’s… or Fruit of the Loom tighty-whity’s. Draw your own conclusions.

So yes, we’ve been sober, asleep, and blissfully unaware of the countdown for most of the last 25 years. There just isn’t much to expound on. And I won’t mention New Year’s resolutions either, since only about 8% of people actually keep them — and I am definitely not an 8-per-center.

Which reminds me of a toast by F. M. Knowles, a Canadian seascape artist I had to look up specifically for this purpose:

“He who breaks a resolution is a weakling; he who makes one is a fool.”

I’ll drink to that.

Happy New Year, my friends.