Quick! It’s New Years Do Something Exciting!

New Years Eve has been renowned as a big celebratory holiday. In all of the television ads, movies, shows, etc. that you see there are people making the change from one year to the next a massively big deal. I’m not saying that this is wrong or that it’s silly to celebrate it since it does mark a milestone. However, it kind of feels a little bit like prom to me…you know, with all the hype about it being the best day of your life, all of the prep work of buying the perfect outfit, making dinner plans with friends, having your makeup and hair done, arranging your transportation, etc., etc., etc. and then the day comes…and it’s over before you know it! For New Years it seems very similar since there’s still all of the hype for that one big day…but then it happens every year! Even so, as far back as I can remember since being old enough I wanted to celebrate New Years with a big bang, you know, do something really special and out of the ordinary…something really memorable!

            This year my boyfriend and I started taking about going on a trip somewhere warm down South around the end of November or beginning of December…you know, right around the time when we started to remember that Ottawa winters mean -38 degree weather (oh yeah baby!). So we started thinking, why not do this vacation for New Years? With this we began our search through ‘Googling’, travel saver emails and newspaper ads. Unfortunately, it turned out that most of the deals we were finding had black-out dates right around the times we wanted to travel. No matter though, we would not be dismayed, we decided to broaden our search…well broaden it to include a wider assortment of vacations… we figured, if we couldn’t go South to someplace warm at least we should try and embrace the winter and get the best out of it (if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right?). So we decided we’d try going on a ski vacation. Back to our searches we went looking for vacation deals and recruiting friends to go with us. This time however, the problem was everyone was going home for Christmas and a lot of those people who were interested in going didn’t think or know if they would be back to the area in time for New Years Eve. So, we put this vacation on hold as well.

            Once we had figured out that our beach and ski vacations wouldn’t work we were a little short on time…Christmas was coming! Our other option was to stay around the area and try to find what celebrations were going on around us. Again, we were not put-out; we decided we could go to the celebrations in Toronto on New Years Eve.

            Just before New Years we both headed towards Toronto, but we were feeling a little apprehensive about going to the outdoor celebrations. The problem wasn’t that they sounded uninteresting or anything, just that…well it sounded like it was going to be icky weather and we didn’t want to stand for a long time in that (you’d think the nasty weather Ottawa gets would prepare us for anything…but, well, you’d be wrong). Besides, a lot of the people we knew in the area were not going to the celebrations either. So, to the LCBO we went, picking up some treats for the night to keep us warm and then off to hang out with friends and watch the Canada vs. US hockey game. 
            At first you might think this doesn’t sound like such an exciting time after attempting various vacations, but to be honest, it was a lot of fun! We figured, why did New Years have to be celebrated in such a high-maintenance kind of way? No matter what you do you should enjoy yourself right, and for us as long as we were with people we enjoy being around it didn’t matter where we were. New Years is going to be special wherever you do your countdown, or your cheers and toasts, or have your midnight kiss as long as you’re with people you care about, and I definitely was. New Years doesn’t mean you have to go crazy and spend lots of money to have a good time, it just means it’s another day to enjoy and celebrate and that’s what we did! So to you all I wish a happy 2010 and I hope your festivities were fun no matter where you were or what you did.