New Year's Eve 2007 was a pretty quiet event around our house. Both older boys were at parties and our daughter...obviously the smartest one of the bunch...was earning big bucks babysitting. Since we have FirstNews on January 1, I hit the the hay early. (Literally. My wife, Jessica, makes me sleep in the barn.) That meant Jessica and the youngest, Harrison, rang in the new year together. In the early years of FirstNews, we didn't do a show on New Year's Day. There was some talk, in those days, of covering Maria Antonia and me in roses, petunias, gladiolas and other blossoms in order to fit in with all the parades. (That idea was shelved when we feared that the later newscasts would develop cases of peonies envy.) We also tried doing the show in four quarters wearing shoulder pads and helmets, in keeping with the bulk of the programming on January 1, but Maria kept decking me when it was supposed to be flag-football NOT tackle! In any case, since 2000, we've been on the air with FirstNews on the first day of the year.

That particular morning, January 1, 2000, we went on the air around 10:00 a.m. There was, as you probably recall, some concern about that turn of the calendar. Would all the computers crash? Would the various power grids get totally confused? Would the cast of Melrose Place survive the millennium? Just what would all those zeroes mean? To be honest, Jim Flink, Lara Moritz and I who were on the show that morning thought our news director was just being cruel by making us come in! Surely, nobody would be watching! Well, just between you and me, he was right. We had a lot of viewers tuning in to make sure they could still tune in, I guess. The night before, Jessica, all the kids and I ushered in 2000 at the newly refurbished Union Station. We listened to the fabulous McFadden Brothers...had some fun in Science City...watched the balloons drop and still made it home in time to hear Neil Diamond sing in the new year from Denver. It was about the only time we've gone out for the celebration.

As I mentioned earlier this year, just a few sentences ago, Jessica and Harrison were the only two creatures awake in our house at midnight. They toasted with Sprite and Ritz Crackers. It reminds me of most of my New Year's Eves as a child. My folks would go over to the neighbors' for several rousing hours of card-playing. This was really not too different from any other Friday or Saturday night, actually. Anyway, they'd be playing Euchre. I've mentioned that card-game before. It is a trick-taking competition with Jacks being the high cards. It is usually played with four people...two teams of two. If you take all five tricks by yourself..."going alone"...you get four points. You also are required to yell, at the top of your lungs, "EUCHRE!!!!" is you achieve this feat. Around our neighborhood, you were more likely to hear "EUCHRE!!!!" then "HAPPY NEW YEAR!" In fact, we had a neighbor named Barney who would stand on his front steps as he went off to work in the morning and holler "EUCHRE!!!!" just for fun. We didn't need a neighborhood rooster. We had Barney.

While my parents were gone my grandma would stay with me. We'd always make a run at midnight. We didn't always make it. At 10:30 p.m., Guy Lombardo and The Royal Canadians would appear on our tiny, black and white TV screen. The orchestra was performing at someplace called The Waldorf-Astoria. As a child, I thought that was a planet in the solar system. Probably made out of lettuce. I wasn't too bright. Since the show was live, that meant they played Auld Lang Syne and showed the big ball dropping in Times Square at 11:00 p.m. Wisconsin time. An hour early! For that next 60 minutes my grandma and I would eat lefse and M&M cookies while playing Yahtzee and Go Fish. If we actually were able to stay awake until the midnight hour, we'd toast each other with Welch's Grape Juice in our best jelly jars. (I liked using the jelly jars because they had Yogi Bear on the sides.) We'd clink the glasses and try to sing Auld Lang Syne without the help of Guy and the guys. It usually came out like this:

Should old acquaintance be forgot (Grandma told me "acquaintance" was like a friend.)
And never brought to mine (My what? I don't know but MINE.)
Should old acquaintance be forgot
And days of old Lang's sign

(We had a great chicken place in town called Lang's and run by a guy named Stub. I don't know why they called him that and I was too afraid to ask. Anyway, I thought that last line had something to do with getting a basket of chicken. As I mentioned before, I wasn't too bright.)

For old Lang's sign, my deer (I was thinking four-legged and furry not romantic.)
For old Lang's sign
We'll drink a cup of Kindness yet (I had no idea where a person could buy a bottle of Kindness or what age you had to be to imbibe.)
For old Lang's sign.

I always thought this was a lot of fuss about a place to eat in a small-town in Wisconsin but I sang anyway.

After the last notes faded, my grandma would send me up to bed where I'd fall asleep instantly looking quite sophisticated in my grape juice moustache. If I'd been thinking, I'd have had grape juice before leaving the house, this morning, to get the same effect. Of course, I'm not a kid anymore and I've discovered there's really no such thing as a Metamucil moustache. How do I know? Mind your own business...and Happy New Year.