SHIRLEY-MASTIC, NY – New Year’s Eve is a time for celebration and there’s no shortage of places to visit in the Shirley-Mastic area.
Here’s a look at some places to consider:
In the United States, of course, one of the most popular New Year’s Eve traditions is dropping the giant ball in New York’s Times Square. Different cities have introduced their own iterations of the event – the Peach Drop in Atlanta, the Chick Drop in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and the giant Potato Drop in Boise, Idaho.
The end of a year and the beginning of a new one is often celebrated with the singing of “Auld Lang Syne,” a Scottish folk song whose title roughly translates to “days gone by,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica and History.com.
The history of New Year’s resolutions stretches back 8,000 years to the ancient Babylonians, who promised to return borrowed items and pay off outstanding debts at the beginning of the new year in mid-March when they broke out their harvest.
According to legend, pagan gods would grant them favor in the coming year if they kept their word. If they broke the promise, they would fall into God’s favor, according to a history of New Year’s resolutions compiled by North Hampton Community College New Center in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Many secular New Year’s resolutions focus on imagining new, improved versions of ourselves. The failure rate of New Year’s resolutions is about 80 percent, according to US News & World Report. The reasons are myriad, but a major one is that they are done, for example, out of regret for gaining weight and are not accompanied by a change in attitude and a plan to manage the stress and discomfort of changing a habit or condition .
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