It’s that time of year again, when everyone goes out, gets drunk, does stupid things and decides to never do it again, at least not till next year. New Year’s Eve, so what are you doing at home reading this?

Every year on December 31st, people decide it sounds like a good idea to go out and have some fun before they start the new year with a great seriousness and a great work ethic, or at least that’s the idea. So what do people in the West do for New Years, well it will depend a lot on the person and where they live. For the most part everyone goes to a party somewhere. New Years parties are the same as every other party except more drinking is involved at at 11:59:50 pm Everyone counts down to the new year.

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“HAPPY NEW YEAR!” everyone will shout, the music will play, champagne will flow and people will receive their first kiss of the new year from the person next to them, and then they will continue drinking till they can’t stand anymore and they stumble home to bed.

In the West New Years is part of the Christmas holiday season so there is no work for about a week afterwards so everyone has lots of time to recover from their wild and crazy New Years parties.

Of course if you happen to live in a major city, there will be big parties downtown probably, and every bar in the country will also be holding some sort of party, and if you happen to live in New York city you can go to the biggest New Years celebration on earth, New Years in Times Square. A massive crowd of people squeeze in downtown New York to watch a giant light covered ball drop to signal in the new year, it looks interesting but standing outside in the cold with 750,000 people waiting for a 10 second ball drop doesn’t actually sound like a good idea to me. But i’m not much of a New Years person, I enjoy parties but every party on New Years is crowded and unable to move around in. The one thing I do love about New Years though is the Fireworks, but in China I’ll just wait till the Spring Festival when the fireworks really get crazy!

So that’s it, drink till you vomit and Happy New Years! The only other tradition I can think of off hand is the New Year’s Resolutions. A New Year’s Resolution is a plan for how you will make this year better than the last, how can you improve yourself this year.

The most common resolutions are losing weight and quitting smoking, I don’t smoke so I guess this year I’ll stick with losing weight as my plan. Hopefully it works better than last year.

Ethan’s New Year’s Resolutions:

1) Exercise more
2) Find more time to visit friends
3) Start Online English Corners
4) Conquer the world and enslave all my enemies