A Poet’s New Year’s Eve Advice

“The only way to spend New Year’s Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.”
— W.H. Auden

Origin of the New Year’s Kiss

Where did the tradition of kissing on New Year’s come from? Historians date this practice back to the Ancient Romans who would throw a big party every New Year’s Eve called the Festival of Saturnalia where they would kiss and generally debauch one another as much as possible.

Later on, the English and Germans would celebrate by kissing the first person they met when the bells rang twelve o’clock. Europeans have also traditionally held masked balls on New Year’s Eve for hundreds of years. In these traditions, the mask symbolizes evil spirits from the old year and the kiss (after removing the mask) is an act of purification.

There is also a superstitious element to it — supposedly kissing those closest to you at the stroke of midnight will strengthen the bonds of your relationship in the year to come.

Tradition and superstition aside, don’t waste your New Year’s kiss. It is one of our most life-affirming pleasures and only comes around so many times. Tonight, use it as an excuse to grab hold of someone you love, someone you’ve had a crush on for ages, or someone who is standing by the drinks table with nice lips. Throw some confetti in the air, grab them round the waist, lean them back and kiss them with everything you’ve got.

Happy New Year!

photo: ekai

Couples Take Prep Course for New Year’s Kiss

Americans are Prep Course Crazy!

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With the abundance of test prep being done nationwide for the SAT, LSAT, ACT, MCAT, GMAT and HAZMAT, is it any surprise that couples are taking a prep course for their New Year’s kiss this year?

You do only get one shot at your midnight kiss after all. (Though I still contend that like the LSATs, a weighted average of past kisses should factor in to the final score, but I don’t make the rules.)

Today 50 New York City couples are meeting up in Times Square for a massive make-out practice session. Organizers are hoping that New Year’s will be the world’s biggest group kiss and claim that it could potentially be the longest in history.

“That is up for debate”, says the Fox News Team. “We’ve been working hard to kiss-up to the Bush Administration without a break for over 8 years now.”

Kissing expert Andrea Demirjian, author of the book “Kissing — Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About One of Life’s Sweetest Pleasures,” will be on hand to help guide the couples as they practice for the lip-lockdown to take place when the famous Waterford crystal ball drops in Times Square on Dec. 31.

Photo: Walmink