December Thirty-First.

It’s supposed to be a day just like any other, but the hustle and the bustle and the liquor and the firm desires to be a better person in a tomorrow that is just like today– along with the fireworks and the revelry and the liquor too– belie the fact that it just isn’t.

It can’t be: beginnings and endings, even if totally arbitrary, will always be blown out of proportion in our minds.  This is part of the reason why teenagers can turn out to be such assholes, you know: they practically expect a new house for just graduating high school because, my God, they GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL.

When, truly, we all know that in the pitiful public school system you would need to actively want to fail in order to do so– and even then there will be systems in place to prevent that from happening, since the schools need the funds that a warm body provides.

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As it seems that this Days of Christmas series has been one of memories, I’m about to tell you one of the cheesiest things I’ve ever done in my life, and which happened to happen around a December 31st.

Everyone in the world has their own superstitions and lucky rituals to bring in the New Year.  Chiefly among us Meows, our new ritual is to attempt to get sleep: it is said that if you manage to sleep through the night on December 31st, twelve glorious months of not having to get up to rescue a toddler from a bad dream or having to get a glass of water at 3 am await.  Ah… wish that were true.

In some Latin American countries there are such silly rituals as running around the block with empty suitcases so you’ll travel more in the coming year, or eating twelve grapes as the bells ring in the new year and making a wish as each grape is eaten.  There is also the tradition of burning an effigy of the Old Year, to herald the new one with a clean slate, so to speak.

And then there is the thing about the panties.

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There used to be a very popular witch in Colombia back in the 1970s and 1980s (yes, I am grimacing as I write this) called Regina 11 (you can click on the site, but sorry–no habla English)  She even tried to run for president at one point in time, I believe, and her political party was represented by a little witch’s broom.  I wish I could say that I am making any of this up, or that we didn’t spend the better half of one December 31st of long ago at the headquarters of this witch, buying up the most hideous pairs of yellow and red panties that were personally blessed and approved by this Regina 11, so that when the stroke of midnight were upon us we could either wish for utter happiness by wearing the yellow panties; or for our  true loves to appear before us in all their dashing true love glory whilst fervently wishing it in our inside-out pairs of red panties.

The funny part of all this witchy business is that ugly though they may have been, those panties were possibly the best-quality panties I’ve ever owned: they withstood anything and everything that came their way with grace and without much loss of elasticity. 

Maybe the true path of happiness truly does lie in the selection of the underwear, after all.

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I leave you with a Colombian song about New Year’s eve.  I do not take responsibility for the cheesiness of the video: it’s really quite bad and it makes me cringe.  But the song is happy and timeless and so I recommend hearing it with your eyes closed.

And with your yellow underpants on.  Happy New Year, world!

31 Dec This entry was published on December 31, 2007 at 10:41 pm and is filed under Days of Christmas. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.