Celebrating a new year

I didn't do a year-in-review this year.  The end of 2012 didn't feel real, in part because how I usually celebrate has been postponed.

Every year, a group of pretty fantastic friends get together in one of our cities to celebrate. I say "one of our cities" but the reality is that they never come to me.  Yet. 

But, we do rotate, and someone always hosts us at their house. They plan a nice restaurant for us to go to and have a 3 or 5 course meal, usually involving a nice steak or a fancy seafood dish.  We plan months in advance to select a set meal that we can anticipate affording and also anticipate enjoying. We usually ring in the New Year at the restaurant, sipping on champagne and exchanging hugs and kisses.  We drink too much, dance a little too little, and just enjoy the company of friends we don't get to see enough.

The next morning, we sleep in - or do so as much as the typical hangover lets you.  Then around noon we wander to someplace cool - again pre-determined for us - to have brunch with mimosas.  We spend the day playing games, chatting with each other, and enjoying the fact that we are collectively barely functional.

These friends are pretty amazing.  In part because we really only see each other this one time a year, but we stay in communication throughout the year to support one another with any major issues, and often with the minor decisions that love and life throw our way.  There's a medical doctor, a doctor in linguistics, a Navy officer (my sister and best friend), a lawyer, a judicial clerk, and me. Only the judicial clerk is male.  We usually include significant others, which has so far really only meant the (medical) doctor's significant other. We sometimes include other friends or a sibling.  But, principally it's this core group of friends who stumble into a new city once a year to celebrate the passing of one A.D. and the starting of another. 2011 became 2012 amongst kisses at my sister's newest temporary flat in Virginia. 2010 had become 2011 with funny hats and champagne toasts and hugs to strangers at the table over in Chicago. Before that, there was Detroit, Cleveland and Columbus.  We're bound to do Chicago again sometime, and Montreal perhaps. I'd love to convince them to meet me in Paris, but I doubt that will happen.

I love NYE with these friends.  There's no judgment when you've had too much champagne; there's no castigation that I haven't had enough (when we drive, it's usually me who is doing the designated driving so I rarely get to have enough). We don't hype it up to some insane level in advance that makes everything we do a disappointment. We just plan to have good food and alcohol and enjoy being around one another when the clock strikes midnight. And we don't lie to ourselves by pretending to have new year's resolutions that won't last longer than the drive home.

We have all agreed: when people say New Year's Eve is always a disappointment, it just means they're doing it wrong.

But this year was a bust. The (medical) doctor was, well, doctoring at a very impressive hospital in Georgia. The (linguistic) doctor was with family out East; my sister is with her ship in the Mediterranean, and for only the second time in my life I spent Christmas and New Year's Eve outside the US.  Only the judicial clerk and thatlawyer could celebrate together, but they decided not to.  So we've postponed our celebrations until my sister's ship docks back in Virginia. I hope to be home then; I plan to be home then, but for some reason the US Navy doesn't really care about my plans when they decide where to send my sister's ship.

So New Year's Eve didn't feel like it was going to be New Year's Eve.  I had a few invitations, and there was a vague discussion of heading to Scotland or London or someplace that isn't my tiny little village.

Those all slowly got scrapped as the reality of travel plans, workloads and money told me to scrap them.

Then I got the invitation for dinner at a PhD friend's house.  It would just be 6 of us.  I thought 5, which would've meant 2 couples and me, but one of the couple's brought a friend.  Thankfully, it was not a set up.  Just an extra friend, so there were two of us as spare wheels, rather than just me.  We celebrated similarly to how I've celebrated the other years.  Wine, and then (faux) champagne, and then whiskey, and then more (faux) champagne. Our 3 course meal ended with a traditional Greek New Year cake, with a coin in the bottom that was supposed to give one of us extra luck for the year.

No one got the piece with the coin.

I like to think that means we'll all get an extra portion of luck this year, though none of us will be abundantly lucky.

Really, it just means the cake cutter started at the wrong end of the circle.

It was a nice, low-key event and was perhaps the closest I could have wished for to my normal festivities.

I still missed my sister and the way she starts scrunching her nose and batting her eyelashes when she drinks the one-too-many glass of champagne.  I miss the way she and the lawyer start competing to see who can flirt with the judicial clerk in the most shocking way. I miss the way he oscillates between embarrassed, inappropriately flirtatious, and shocked.  I miss watching the medical doctor change and grow year to year. Not to sound like I'm her grandmother, but I've watched her grow from a competitive flirt to a mature woman with a cool, breezy air to her.  I miss the linguist's questions, the way she gets to heart of our lives and doesn't let us skip a full holiday without being authentic and honest with each other.  I miss the way our conversations ebb and flow between the ridiculousness of which-celebrity-we'll-never-meet-is-now-pregnant to the intensity of life, politics, and the world's woes.  I miss (temporarily) solving one another's love lives; letting them remind me that I'm a "catch" who just hasn't found "the one" but will at "the right time."  It's a reassurance I get from lots of people here, but with them it has more resonance. They know me. And they're all currently single-ish (except the medical doctor, but we love her anyhow).

Mostly I miss the opportunity to be a good friend to them and to receive their good friendship.  During the year - and particularly at this moment of the year for me - I often realize I'm not the best friend to have in the world, particularly as a best friend. I get caught up in the here-and-now of life and while I promise phone calls and skype dates, I often end up postponing them.  I pray for these friends and love them and miss them and occasionally email them, but I'm generally complete crap at actually being there on the regular basis you would hope your good friends are.

This one time of the year is my chance to make it right.  Not to excuse the previous year's worth of less-than-awesomeness, but to really engage on a deep level with deep friends.  It's a chance to start anew with the year, and every year we do get better and better collectively at keeping in touch.

This year, I have to do that without the weekend get-away. Without the steak, and the dancing, the scrabble games, the Cranium, and the brunch.  This is the new year, and I will again be better at keeping in touch.  Just as soon as I finish this paper...

(Seriously, though, as soon as I'm done with this paper I'm writing (supposed to be finishing right now), these friends can count on a massive round of phone calls.)