Why I’m celebrating New Year’s Eve tonight - and you should, too
When illnesses ruined her big plans, Chloe Hamilon wondered what do I do? The answer’s simple: redo them
“She has chickenpox,” read the message from my friend, two days before our big New Year’s Eve party. “I guess it wouldn’t be Christmas without a child illness taking out the plans.”
Collectively – and begrudgingly – we put the Prosecco back in the fridge, cancelled babysitters, and checked what was on the telly for New Year’s Eve. Just a day later, my son, too, caught the pox (that pre-Christmas music class really had been a super-spreader), the final nail in the coffin for our plans.
I’d prepared myself for many challenges ahead of having children: labour, breastfeeding, weaning, and how to manage the emotionally turbulent toddler years. What I hadn’t considered, perhaps foolishly, was just how often plans would be cancelled because my child – or someone else’s – was infectious.
As someone who likes plans to be locked in early (my partner still teases me for trying to figure out, two years in advance, where and when we’d eat Christmas lunch based on the nap schedule of a baby that had not yet been born), it’s anxiety-inducing not knowing whether events are happening or not. At times, as a parent to a three-year-old and an eight-month-old, I feel as though I’m playing disease dodgeball, constantly on the lookout for the latest bug that may take us out or calculating incubation periods to determine when we’re allowed outside again.
It’s exhausting, and if I’m honest, I hate it. So when my friends suggested we simply “redo” our New Year’s Eve plans when everyone was a bit less spotty, I felt a wave of relief: maybe 2025 wouldn’t be so bad after all.
I’m not alone in attempting a “redo.” Only the other day, I bumped into a friend who was planning a Christmas Day rerun that very weekend, as the kids had been poorly on the actual day. And one Instagram influencer I follow, who had been so excited for her eight-month-old daughter’s “perfect” first Christmas, simply redid the whole day – turkey, crackers, presents, everything – a few days later after her child found the excitement of the actual day too overwhelming.
You can’t do a half-hearted “redo,” of course. We, for example, plan to incorporate a countdown into our evening. After all, this is not just a regular party; this is us trying again to see in the new year. We intend to watch the fireworks and maybe even a bit of hootenanny. Personally, I hope someone fully commits to the bit and comes in complaining about Christmas with their in-laws or questioning what day of the week it is, even though we’re all back at work now and the in-laws have long since been packed off home.
I suspect, since Covid, we’ve all become a bit more au fait with cancelling and rearranging. I, myself, cancelled and rearranged my own wedding twice. Wedding planner Michelle Jacobs says 2022, in particular, was a big year for wedding redos as couples tried to recapture some of the wedding joy they were “denied” during the pandemic.
And it would appear the notion of simply replaying an important day if it doesn’t quite go to plan has stayed with us post-pandemic – a healthy approach, I think. Megan Lomax, for example, is, this summer, going again to two friends’ joint 50th birthday celebrations after, last year, both birthday people were taken out by a sickness bug and food poisoning, respectively. “We’re doing it all again this year,” she says. “Same guests, same place. Probably not the same oysters.”
In fact, I think we should celebrate the “redo” for all the pressure it takes off us. You can, it seems, jump in the same river twice if you never actually got wet the first time.
Or, at least, that’s what I’m trying to tell myself as my now pox-free baby succumbs to his first sickness bug just days away from the big redo. As I chase my newly crawling baby around with a Tupperware to catch his vomit (impossible, by the way), I can’t help wondering if I’ll be able to convince my friends to redo the redo.
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