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I grew up spending New Year’s Eve with my crabby, Italian American grandmother, Mama Rose,  waiting for Guy Lombardo to ring in the new year and sing _Auld Lang Syne _on television. As soon

as the final chorus ended, Mama Rose refilled her glass of apricot brandy and said, “Go to bed now. It’s next year.” After watching high society dressed in sparkly gowns and tuxedos at the

glamorous Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City on TV, I always went to bed feeling disappointed and deflated. Out in the real world, people were having fun, drinking champagne, kissing and

dancing. Even my parents. They would leave in the afternoon to celebrate with other couples at the Ramada Inn in Seekonk, Massachusetts, about 20 miles from home. I watched my mother as she

packed a shiny satin dress, elbow-length gloves, high heels and a bouffant-style wig in her American Tourister overnight bag for the dinner-dance that night, and a camel hair suit with a

cashmere sweater and a wig styled into a flip for the buffet breakfast the next morning. They came home with stories of the steamship round of beef sliced tableside, the flutes of champagne

and the fancy dresses and jewelry everyone wore, and I just sighed and wondered how many more New Year’s Eves I’d have to spend with Mama Rose and Guy Lombardo. “That was the night I gave up

my childish expectations of the holiday I had come to dread and maybe even hate a little. That was the night that I realized I had two people who loved me so much that they drove 200 miles

to be with me.” NAIVE NEW YEAR’S EXPECTATIONS Time passed, of course, and the year I was 15, I had a boyfriend. Surely New Year’s Eve with green-eyed, dreamy Mark would be as romantic as I

imagined. But December was going by without any mention of New Year’s Eve plans. Finally, I asked him if we were going to do something together to celebrate. A party? A fancy dinner? A

sleigh ride in the snow? Mark looked puzzled. He hadn’t thought much about it, he admitted. “Well, start thinking!” I told him. Now that I had a boyfriend, I was practically required to have

fun on Dec. 31. I had to dress up.  We had to kiss at the stroke of midnight. A few hours after my parents went to the Ramada Inn in Seekonk, Mark arrived with a bottle of Manischewitz wine

pilfered from his parents’ liquor cabinet. Mama Rose had made spaghetti and meatballs, and we sat at the kitchen table, eating and sipping the overly sweet wine. Then we migrated to the

living room where we watched Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians with Mama Rose, holding hands, with at least one of us feeling miserable. By the next year, Mark and I had broken up, and I

didn’t have another real boyfriend for almost a decade. Every New Year’s Eve, my friends and their dates would go to parties or nightclubs in glittery clothes. “See you next year!” they

would say on their way out into the future as I stayed behind, often with the other dateless friends, watching old movies and pretending it wasn’t the most romantic night of the year. When I

worked as a TWA flight attendant after college, I happily offered to work New Year’s Eve, handing out free champagne to passengers unlucky enough to have to travel that night. On layovers

in foreign cities, it was easy to forget that it was time for _Auld Lang Syne_. But then, in 1983, at age 26, I met Josh on a flight from San Francisco to New York, and fell so hard in love

that I believed this would be the New Year’s Eve I’d always expected — the one where a handsome man would kiss me at midnight and we’d clink champagne glasses and begin a new year together.

All the promise of that night was going to finally be mine. Josh was an aspiring actor who worked as a bartender at a restaurant on New York City’s Upper East Side, that 1980s kind with pale

wood and lots of ferns. I wondered if we’d have dinner there, maybe with some of his theater friends, or if we’d go to a party near downtown. “I thought I told you,” Josh said when I asked

him about our plans, “I volunteered to work. Everybody else has big plans, and I don’t really care about it.”