Over the years I have concluded that the very best way to celebrate New Year’s Eve is quietly, with family and dearest friends. It’s not as if I have not tried the alternative, a night out on the town with food, drink, dancing and lots of noise. But it always seemed to me that, for all the elaborate accouterments, New Year’s Eve never quite lived up to expectations, and always seemed a bit forced. Of course, it may also be a product of my age and the prodigious demands on energy, strength and stamina an entire long evening up to and beyond midnight exacts on New Year’s revelers. Midnight is an hour or so beyond my normal reach these days.

Every year I remember the New Year’s Eve observation of my childhood. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I asked my father one time what exactly was going on when one year ended and another began. He told me that there is an empty space between the old and new year and if you stand outside and watch carefully you can actually see it. You must watch very carefully he solemnly explained because the space between the years is quite small and passes in a second or two. And so for several years when I was first allowed to stay up to see the new year in, I stood out on the front porch in the cold dark watching for the space to come down 21st Avenue. I never saw it but I cannot say for sure that it doesn’t exist.

In the days before television when you couldn’t at least watch the revelry in New York’s Times Square as the big ball descends precisely at midnight, my parents sent my brother and me out onto the porch to create a celebratory clatter by beating pots and pans together when the railroad shop whistle signaled that it was midnight and a new year.

I was fortunate this year to be in Santa Fe with a portion of our big family: daughter, son and their spouses, young adult grandson, granddaughters with partner and boyfriend, and two delightful little girls, California granddaughters 10 and 8. Skiing was the daytime activity while some held down the homestead and worked on the chili, chopping, dicing, sautéing, simmering. After the meal charades provided great howls of laughter and at midnight New York time – a civilized 10:00 pm in New Mexico – my son-in-law popped the corks on bottles of champagne and we all sipped, toasted, and kissed and danced. Sure enough, my son and daughter, remembering the old front porch ritual I taught them when they were children, took their children out into the cold darkness to watch for the space between 2014 and 2015 and made the high desert air ring with the unmistakable clang of pots and pans.

Happy New Year.