Cards, Lime, Salt.
On New Year’s Eve I take a tequila shot for my grandma. She died on January 1, 2021. Avid cookie jar collector, Hallmark movie watcher, sugar-free snow cone addict. She loved sunflowers and she was also my neighbor. I watched as Amazon packages of sugar-free snow cone syrup were delivered in arm fulls to her home for a snow cone machine she wasn’t strong enough to use most of the time. It made all of us laugh, and also drove us slightly mad.
New Year’s is my favorite holiday, and I can’t ever really put my finger on why. It’s like everything that has ever happened on a New Year’s Eve or day is folded together in one long timeline that lasts only seconds. The days after feel like the slow dwindling away of something magic— like anything you did during those days has some sort of navigation power over your life for the next year or years.
When I was processing the grief of my grandma, trying to put language to something that wasn’t ready for it yet during this window of magic time in 2021, a tall professor who plays guitar like a mad man kindly said to me, “You find a place to put it once you get the language, but she’ll always be over there making snow cones.”
It made me laugh while I was doing some sort of held back cry that sounded a lot like a fire alarm needing new batteries, chirping out every few minutes or so. My grandma willed herself to make it to 2021, and she did, and now she’s there making snow cones on this date that folds together all the New Years Eve and day memories perpetually. I can see her whole weight, all 100 pounds of her, leaning onto the handle trying to crush that damn ice.
The tequila is because I like it, and because it’s something that would’ve gotten a fun rise out of her too— which I also like.
The anatomy of the New Year's holiday has come to feel like an assortment of objects: a deck of cards, a sharp bite into a lime, and a gracious amount of salt.
There’s the deck, with each card holding onto a New Year’s fragment.
On one card is the time we drove up and down the hills to Denver, and ate the burrata at the recommended restaurant in town. That night you wore the cheetah bucket hat, and we danced in a living room of good company, and watched another team of sisters do the full Napoleon Dynamite dance.
There’s the card that shows us in my favorite living room, our parent’s home, with grapes in our hands and spilling out our mouths as we tried unsuccessfully to eat 10 of them on the 10 second countdown. Sticky hands and grins and uncontrollable laughter.
On another card is the time we watched Little Women, and the car broke down before 2020, but we made it home and thank god for Sonic mozzarella sticks.
The next card is building snowmen the morning she died, and the whole neighborhood followed suit in her honor. A whole cul-de-sac of snow people. We accidentally wore matching cardinal pajamas, and she became a cardinal too, like all the other beloved, wonderful, cardinal grandmas of the world.
Then there’s the other card where you set “more love, more life” as an intention on a stool at our favorite bar. Another New Years card shows the eve that you want to forget, but you can’t because that would be going against the mystical reality of New Years— it all folds together, the good and the bad, and that’s what makes it good.
On another card, there’s the pool games, the champagne cheers with gyros at way too late o’clock, and the bullshit card game with the four of us that lasted until we were all too tired to laugh or talk anymore. The wave goodbye at sunrise, that was truly a thank you for the kindness and for changing my mind. A night that makes you say, “What was that? How funny.” I’d have that night again. But even if I don’t, I get to keep it in my deck.
Shuffle up these cards, and they all feel like a captured moment in time on one day where it seems like there is pressure to do something or else it didn’t count. But that felt “doingness” of New Years is the bitter lime.
There’s sometimes that moment we’ve been taught to feel on New Year’s— the panic of plans, of “Did we get a reservation for that spot? Did we need it?” It’s the trick part of New Year’s that if you entertain it, it can spoil the night, because there’s not enough room for magic with too many plans, or too many worries about not having enough plans.
The lime is also the bitter part of leaving things behind. On a day that is seen as a holiday of change and hope, I think a lot of us are encoded, and owed, to feel a few minutes of what’s leaving us before a new start. For me this feeling happens right as I start moving into the new year while still in the old one, a foot on each side of the timeline at around 9:00pm in the old year. These days are so glued together, that the two feel like one.
Then, there’s the salt. The lack of control magic. The space between plans, letting go of the old year, and letting go of expectations for the new one. Setting goals aside with the assurance and confidence that you are in alignment with something, and it is okay for you not to know the next step this very second.
It’s the feeling that you’ve set everything in motion, and it’s time to see what happens in the empty spaces. It’s the driving in the dark with headlights feeling. It’s the “whatever happens, happens” expression that takes miles and miles to get to and genuinely feel. To me, this is the salt, because it’s tiny, flavorful, and gets everywhere when your cooking style is messy like mine. Those days after New Year’s feel like a good tasting meal that you don’t want to drink or eat anything after for a bit. Regardless if the time was good, or the time was bad, it’s was noted in the glued together hours of New Year’s Eve and day, printed on a card, shuffled, and sealed up in a box. The salt helps the feelings linger.
I guess I like New Years because I don’t feel time in an everyday way, and that feels like something to celebrate and wear until it wears out. I hope you found a memory to collect and carry into this new year and the years to come. Cheers!