Spend Your New Year's Eve With Your Parents

This New Year’s Eve, go home to your parents’ house, assuming you can. If you can’t, head to another family member’s house, the person you love and trust and know through blood or marriage or adoption. You with me?

Consider your other, lesser options: Partying hard. Really painting the town. Whatever cliched idiom of your choosing ends with you picking a poison to swill. Farewell, 2018, let’s drink ourselves into oblivion and wake up in the bathtub January 1st, penniless and broken from carousing with friends and strangers and make out buddies.

Or maybe you’re just exhausted, hunched over in a dark room, posture permanently curved from internalizing the weight of the world. In that case, you’ve written off the holiday off as no different from, say, a Friday or Saturday night. And because New Year’s Eve is just another mundane evening out with added expectations (and consequently, disappointments), you’re likely going to stay in, order dinner and binge on Netflix until you wake up in a new year, almost certainly asleep before midnight. Alone. That sounds sad. You were in until the “alone” bit, right?

What if you could still enjoy a quiet evening in without the reminder of your self-selected, debilitating seclusion?

The solution is simple: go to your family’s house. I am aware that this is not a possibility for all, but if it is for you, go to your parents’ home. Even if they live across the street or on the other side of the planet, getting up and off of your marinara-stained comforter to eat in someone else’s home will scratch your But shouldn’t I be doing something on New Year’s? itch. You did do something. You went somewhere. Good for you! No hangover tomorrow, baby, because dad’s only gonna wanna open one bottle of Brut.

Watch some television and, most importantly, eat all of your parents’ snacks. Because this is a family household you’ve now infiltrated, it is potentially filled to the brim with snacks you never buy for yourself for fear of consuming them all in one sitting. Hey, you’re human, and improving your self-control is your resolution for next year. They’re there for the taking and it’ll cost you nothing.

If you don’t particularly get along with your parents but you do so on occasion—like, on Thanksgiving, major life events, infrequent family get-togethers—treat New Years’ Eve like one of those days. Get in and get out. Spend one night, and potentially wake to a home cooked meal in the morning. If you’re brave, stay an extra day. You will return to your life relaxed, unburdened by loneliness or a misplaced credit card at a bar you don’t remember entering. You will have welcomed the New Year with the people who welcomed you into the world (or, like, a badass Auntie.) That’s poetry, my friend.