“It was so sad,” says McCrossen, a history professor from Texas. “There was just trampled-on confetti everywhere, and it was empty. It just didn’t not feel like the triumphant beginning of the new year.”
Does it ever? The holiday is billed as a juncture of hope and renewal, fresh starts and clean slates. But for many of us New Year’s Day is more often marked by hangovers and to-do lists. Late starts, soiled slates. Sparkly outfits rumpled on the floor. Regrets about not having had a good enough time. Remorse about having had too good of a time.
Should old acquaintance be forgot… but now it all comes rushing back. Work is coming. School is coming. If the carols are to be believed, we were just in “most wonderful time of the year.” Now it’s just … January.
New Year’s Day. The ultimate Sunday Scaries.
“New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, the week after, I often get the most referrals I’ll get in the entire year – 50, 70 a day,” says Jessica MacNair, a therapist in Falls Church, Va. “This is when I see the most clients in total crisis.”
Yule logs and reindeer games notwithstanding, the winter holidays are a grueling stretch for many people. Some people need to process whatever happened with their families, or the experience of going through that time without family or friends and “dealing with feelings of rejection or loneliness,” MacNair says.
And then there’s the pressure of all those promises you made to yourself.
“Whenever my clients use the term New Year’s resolution I make a cringe face,” she says. “I don’t want them to do that. Because it sets you up,” says MacNair. “It’s a very confronting day, New Year’s. There are all of these expectations and then people feel like they’re not good enough or they’re not measuring up.”
Brian Moller is a goal-setter. In the lead-up to the New Year, Moller, a 34-year-old actor who lives outside of Boston, really does reflect on the highs and lows of the past 12 months and sets intentions for the year ahead.
And then he wakes up on Jan. 1 and forgets them.
“I’m too exhausted,” he says. “It doesn’t even matter if I went out and drank. I was up late. On New Year’s Day, I’m always too tired to do all the things I said I was going to do.”
Haleigh Booth gets that. In a video she posted on TikTok last year, Booth, a 32-year-old Realtor who lives in Louisville, Ky., caricatured the annual collapse of her will to be a New Person: She filmed herself proudly consuming half a grape and a glass of water at 8 a.m., but by 10 a.m. she’s hitting the chips, then the fast food, then the cookies, brownies and wine.
“Every year I say I’m gonna do something and then I end up slipping up on it,” Booth told the Post.
That goes for the night before, too, by the way. Each New Year’s Eve she swears she’s going to “maybe have just one glass of wine” so she doesn’t wake up feeling like crap. But then the party is fun, the music is loud and the wine keeps flowing. And the next morning she wakes up to a pile of health goals stashed in the corner with last night’s noisemakers.
And even though she doesn’t work a typical 9-5 schedule, each New Year’s Day also brings the mother of two a wave of anxiety over the return to routine.
“Just me having to get ready to get the kids to school,” she says. “I like to sleep in.”
McCrossen, the history professor, stopped making New Year’s resolutions a long time ago. “I feel like, if I need to make a change, I need to make it now,” she says. In the 14 years since she and her daughter encountered that detritus-strewn scene in New York City, she’s begun working on a book about the history of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. And it’s not all pretty.
For hundreds of years New Year’s Day was when the Catholic church would commemorate Jesus’s circumcision. (It was changed by the Vatican in the mid 20th Century to honor the “Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God.”) More horrifying is the history of New Year’s Day in America. Before the Civil War, McCrossen says, New Year’s was sometimes referred to as “Heartbreak Day,” when many enslaved people would be sold or hired out to new enslavers, pulling families apart.
In Northern cities, New Year’s Day was a day of formal social visits, and by the early 20th century, people started gathering in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. The first New Year’s Eve ball made its descent in 1907 and the expectation of great things happening that night simultaneously shot through the stratosphere. Perhaps you’ll kiss a charming stranger! Get engaged! Have the best night of your life!
Or not, but you can still dress up and hope for the best. Then you can wake up, as Moller, the actor, put it in a TikTok video, with a mouth that “tastes like buttered foot.”
That’s why Moller thinks New Year’s Day should be a skip day. Just an automatic pass. Because sometimes the first day turns out to be the worst day.
“It’s always January 2nd,” he says, “when I finally get my life together.”
