(Host) Writer and commentator Annie Guyon doesn’t start the New Year with a laundry list of resolutions, but she does make a statement – with lots and lots of paper.
(Guyon) I’ve never been into New Year’s Resolutions or New Year’s Eve over-indulgence. We usually just hang out at home with a few friends and families, eating, playing games and listening to music while debriefing each other on holiday highlights.
But I do use the New Year as a way to remember something I consider to be very important; and, in that sense, I suppose you could call it my New Year’s Reminder.
Each New Year’s Eve, I remind myself and my kids that it’s okay and even good to break a minor rule every now and then, and this wisdom comes in a very familiar and simple form: confetti!
A lot of folks wince at the notion of their homes being blanketed with tiny bits of paper and make a point to not even let the stuff in the house, if at all possible.
Me, I take the opposite route. I like what confetti does to people – it shows us that at least once a year kids and adults alike can completely let loose, throw handfuls of color into the air, whoop and holler, be loud and be messy – with no holds barred and no guilt.
I mean, think about it: we’re taught to always be organized, have self-control and behave, starting as kids being lectured on having clean rooms and good manners. So it might sound silly, but I think it’s good for us, at least once a year, to do the opposite, and intentionally, wholeheartedly, make a huge, widespread, wonderfully vibrant mess.
The fallout, so to speak, is worth every fleck… spot… speckle and polka-dot. Last year we even got politically correct about it by using my office paper-shredder to make homemade confetti, making sure to mix in post-Christmas wrapping paper for added grooviness.
After the deluge is over, when the kids are nestled all snug in their beds, I get out every vacuum attachment known to man and denude the entire living room of not just confetti but whatever other flotsam and jetsam of life may have accumulated since the last Great Vacuum, as I call it.
Places that don’t get much regular attention – under the couch, behind the TV, the tops of books, and in between tchotchkes – are all meticulously cleaned. So the room becomes spotless – literally – with nary a microscopic crumb, much less dust-bunny, in sight; and in the morning the kids wonder if it was all a wildly festive dream they’d had.
I do occasionally run across vestiges of our annual confetti bash. In fact, there’s a solitary pink dot from many New Year’s Eves ago, which has been suspended from the ceiling ever since – probably by an old tiny spider web.
I’ve never wanted to brush it away because each time I spot it dangling up there I’m reminded of that joyous moment of total abandon, when the kids go nuts, our home becomes a fun-house, and my hair becomes a technicolor nest, as we gleefully usher in the New Year.