This article may contain affiliate links. If you buy through them, A Home Filled With Love may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more.
The percolator my mother used every morning of her married life sits on my counter still, dented on one side, the kind of pot you have to watch and listen to rather than set and forget. I keep a modern coffee maker for ordinary mornings. On New Year’s Day, I use the percolator, the same way my mother did on the first morning of every year I can remember from childhood.
New Year’s Day in my house is a quiet, deliberate reset, and it starts before anyone else is awake, with the sound of that percolator working on the stove.
The house the night before
We do not stay up much past eleven most years. My husband and I used to try harder at midnight, a small gathering of neighbors, something with more noise to it, and somewhere in our fifties we quietly let that go without ever really discussing it. Now the last night of the year is closer to any other evening, dinner, television, bed not long after ten most of the time, unless grandchildren are visiting and determined to see the ball drop on television.
The one thing that does not change is that I wash every dish in the house before I go to sleep on the thirty first. I do not want a single glass in the sink when the new year starts. It is not a rule I could defend with any real reasoning. It is simply something I have done for so long that skipping it would feel like starting the year off balanced wrong.
What comes down on the first
The Christmas decorations do not all come down on New Year’s Day itself, that happens gradually over the following week as I described elsewhere, but the outdoor lights do come off that first morning, always before noon. My husband climbs the ladder while I hold it steady from below, the two of us working through a task that has gotten slightly harder on his knees each year, though neither of us has said so out loud.
Starting a year with the outside of the house looking like the holiday already ended feels like giving the year room to become its own thing.
The meal is simple, on purpose
After the noise and the cooking of December, I do not put together anything elaborate for New Year’s Day dinner. There is a dish of greens and black eyed peas that I make every year, a habit my mother passed down though neither of us ever fully explained where it came from beyond a vague sense that it was meant to bring good fortune for the months ahead. I do not know if I believe that. I make it anyway, every year, without fail.
The dining table stays plain, no tablecloth, no good dishes. After the formality of Thanksgiving and Christmas, there is something I look forward to in setting an ordinary table again, the everyday plates, the everyday glasses, nothing that needs to be handled carefully.
The rest of the day is unhurried
I spend a good part of New Year’s Day afternoon simply walking through the house, room by room, noticing what needs attention now that the holiday rush is over. A drawer that never got straightened before Thanksgiving guests arrived. A closet shelf that has needed reorganizing since October. I do not do all of it in one day. I make a short list and let the list carry me quietly into January rather than trying to fix everything at once.
By evening
The percolator gets washed and dried and put back on its shelf in the pantry, not to be used again until the following December thirty first. The house by dinnertime looks like an ordinary house on an ordinary day, the outdoor lights gone, the tablecloth still folded away from Thanksgiving and Christmas, everything quiet and plain.
I have come to think New Year’s Day is less about the year ahead than people make it out to be, and more about closing the year just finished properly, dish by dish, light by light, until the house is empty of holiday and ready to simply be lived in again. My mother never explained the black eyed peas or the percolator to me in any deep way. She just did them, every year, and now I do too, and maybe that is explanation enough.
The first grocery trip of the year
Sometime in the afternoon I make a short trip to the store, usually for nothing more than milk and a loaf of bread, and I have noticed over the years that the store on New Year’s Day is almost always half empty and unusually quiet, as if everyone else in town has agreed to stay home that first day too. I like driving those empty streets more than I probably should admit. It feels like the whole town is taking the same slow breath before the year properly starts.
