Dear radiant rebels,

Happy New Year! I hope you celebrated the end of the old year and the start of the new in a joyful, restorative way. Judging from my social media feeds, it seems like many of you did!

I’ve always been very conflicted about New Year’s Eve celebrations. For one, I’m a confirmed introvert, and every time I‘ve ever made big plans for New Year’s Eve celebrations, I’ve been sorely disappointed: inevitably, I’d get overwhelmed by drunken crowds, and just count the minutes until I could yell “HAPPY NEW YEAR” and go home. Also — I’ve never really understood toasting the new year when it hasn’t happened yet. What if the year turns out to be horrible? (We toasted 2020 before it happened on December 31st, 2019, and look how insane that year turned out to be, is all I’m saying.). The way I figure it, it makes more sense to celebrate what we’ve accomplished in the year prior. In Trinidad, we call New Year’s Eve “Old Year’s Night,” and that always felt far more appropriate. “We did it!” seemed to be the sentiment. “Well done, us!”

In any event, as we approached December 31st, 2022, for the first time in years, I started to get itchy with a need to celebrate. After all, 2022 was a big year for our family: Alex’s graduation, Marcus and I celebrating our 20th anniversary, me turning in a book manuscript. These felt worthy of commemoration, of doing something bigger than simply binge-watching Netflix until we counted down to midnight and drank champagne (which, don’t get me wrong, I intended on doing as well). But the idea of partying with a crowd still didn’t feel right. So, what to do?

And then, on December 30th, it hit me, and I wondered — what was the likelihood that we could get lunch reservations at a fancy restaurant for just the three of us to propertly toast the end of the year?

Turns out, it wasn’t that difficult! And so the next day — Old Year’s Day, if you will — we went out for a celebratory lunch.

It was great: we got to get dressed up, but not so dressed up that we were uncomfortable. We drank champagne. We were able to take a little walk after lunch. And we still were home in time to light sparklers and toast midnight. In fact, it was so lovely, I suspect it’s the birth of an annual tradition.