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So here we are, huh? Just a couple of short days from New Years Eve, and what have YOU accomplished this year? Did you keep any of those resolutions, huh? You got a year older, you know. But did you save the world? Or the baby seals? Come on, you could have gotten around to the baby seals, couldn’t you? And what about all the organic produce you were gonna grow and the books you were gonna read? Huh? What happened to all that, you know, to the IMPROVED you? Bet you didn’t even floss every morning.

Not that I can relate to the litany above, because I love New Year’s Eve.

Always have – always will.

Perhaps it’s because I never make new year’s resolutions that I have such fond New Years’ memories.

Entering 1991, I stood on the roof of an old apartment building in what was then the red light district in Copenhagen. Clutching a bottle of champagne, leaning up against the cold brick chimney, I watched as fireworks went off all around me. From the big downtown hotels, from Tivoli gardens, from the huge ocean liners in the harbor – the night sky was green and red and blue.

My best friend was there with me. She cried for a relationship that had just ended and I cried for one that had just begun, happy and scared, instinctively knowing that it would take me far away from everything I knew.

I rode my bike home to my mom’s house that night, through deserted streets, littered with dead rockets and glitter, past the first morning papers, into a year of enormous change and challenge.

My next New Year’s Eve was celebrated in the Washington D.C. suburbs.

Just two years ago, in the first moments of another new year, I sat on a back porch in Southern California, together with my sister-in-law. Sharing another bottle of champagne and a handful of cookies, we stared at the huge, black, humid, starlit California night, sharing hopes and dreams and wishes.

Some have already come true, but we still live too far apart.

On Saturday, I will hold the second New Year’s party in my big old scary house.

The house looks a little better this year, but it’s by no means done.

There are gallons of paint that have yet to hit the wall, projects that aren’t quite completed, faucets that drip and wall cracks that should have been filled.

But here’s the beauty of New Year’s Eve:

On the morning of January First, you get a whole new year, just waiting for you to do some of what needs to be done. And that’s exactly why I love New Year’s Eve.