For Auld Lang Syne

    Good morning.  It's 9:00 A.M and I am awake.  I know, this is very unusual for a guy who normally awakes between 5:00 A.M. and 6:00 A.M., but I was up until after midnight!  Of course, I have some thoughts about all the falderal.

    What happened to Auld Lang Syne?  This song has been around since 1788, each year posing the rhetorical question, "Should auld (old) acquaintance(s) be forgot(ten) and never brought to mind?  Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne (days gone by)?"  It's a song that extols the continuance of friendships and the memories we have made together.  So why has Frank Sinatra's version of New York, New York replaced these wonderful Scottish lyrics on New Year's Eve in Times Square?  Are those folks so myopic that they cannot see beyond their little few square miles?  Is New York City now the center of the universe?

    I have never completely understood the focus on this one day of the year to celebrate and make resolutions.  I do understand the desire of people to manufacture a day when they can get drunk and act like fools without the usual condemnation that accompanies that kind of behavior.  I will never understand the desire of people to expend extraordinary efforts to be one of the great hoard, packed like pixels in a megatron above Times Square, standing with complete strangers violating their personal space, wearing ridiculous hats and glasses for most of the day and into the night just so they can watch an opulent crystal ball descend for one minute and yell and scream.  That I don't get. 

    Even allowing for my natural tendency to eschew crowds or even medium size groups, I do not comprehend all this excitement being centered on one moment in time.  The arguments I have heard usually concentrate on the benefit of a second chance; starting over.  So people make resolutions.  "From this moment forward I will be a benevolent person."  "Starting today I will lose that extra 120 pounds I'm hauling around."  "I will stop smoking this year…again."  I believe it is admirable to resolve to improve oneself, but only if there is a plan and true determination prior to the resolution.  And how often are those two components involved in New Year's resolutions?  This tradition seems more like an invitation to fail year after year.  No thank you.  I will resolve to change things as I am moved by the Spirit to do so, not because somebody else thinks I should because it is New Year's Day.  Whatever happened to the daily mantra, "Today is the first day of the rest of my life" that so many were quoting some years ago?  Doesn't that make more sense that waiting until a bunch of screaming pretty faces with microphones fabricate excitement on an arbitrarily chosen day in an egocentric city?  If everyone insists on choosing one day, would it not make more sense to choose an equinox or the earth's perihelion? 

    "It is tradition, so get over it!" you may say.  I am all for tradition.  So, let us all continue to celebrate New Year's Day, but let us all bring back that grand old tradition of singing Auld Lang Syne.

[For all the words, check out Wikipedia on Auld Lang Syne https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Auld_Lang_Syne. ]

I love this rendition of this grand old song:

 

    And to all my friends I offer the last verse: 

And there’s a hand my trusty friend !
And give us a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll take a right good-will draught,
for auld lang syne.