Comfort Food From Louisiana: 12/01/2010

Start your New Year off right with lots of laughter and some smart advice on meeting those New Year resolutions.

From Denny: Before you stay up all night to ring in the New Year, swill some good champagne and watch the fireworks on TV, catch a laugh here. I rounded up the best and funniest quotes about the New Year. Enjoy some New Year's poems too.

New Years Quotes

* New Year's Day… now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. - Mark Twain

* Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to. - Bill Vaughan

* New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions. - Mark Twain

* The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to. - P. J. O'Rourke

* Now there are more overweight people in America than average-weight people. So overweight people are now average... which means, you have met your New Year's resolution. - Jay Leno

* Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go. - Brooks Atkinson

* New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time. - James Agate

* An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves. - Bill Vaughan

* Many people look forward to the New Year for a new start on old habits. - Anonymous

* May all your troubles last as long as your New Year's resolutions! - Joey Adams

* I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me. - Anais Nin

* Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account. - Oscar Wilde

* I'm a little bit older, a little bit wiser, a little bit rounder, but still none the wiser. - Robert Paul

* A New Year's resolution is something that goes in one Year and out the other. - Anonymous

* From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining. - Leonard Bernstein

* The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot. - Michael Altshuler

* Never tell your resolution beforehand, or it's twice as onerous a duty. - John Selden

* It wouldn't be New Year's if I didn't have regrets. - William Thomas

* People are so worried about what they eat between Christmas and the New Year, but they really should be worried about what they eat between the New Year and Christmas. – Anonymous

* The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears. - W.H. Auden

* A New Year's resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other. - Anonymous

* New Year's Eve, where auld acquaintance be forgot! Unless, of course, those tests come back positive. - Jay Leno

* It is better to spend money like there's no tomorrow than to spend tonight like there's no money. - P. J. O'Rourke

* Every New Year is the direct descendant, isn't it, of a long line of proven criminals? - Ogden Nash

* Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

New Year's Blessings

* New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights. - Hamilton Wright Mabie

* Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

* Look not mournfully into the past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the present. It is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future, without fear, and with a manly heart. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

* I will seek elegance rather than luxury, refinement rather than fashion. I will seek to be worthy more than respectable, wealthy and not rich. I will study hard, think quietly, talk gently, and act frankly. I will listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with an open heart. I will bear all things cheerfully, do all things bravely await occasions and hurry never. In a word I will let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious grow up through the common. - William Ellery Channing

* We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives, not looking for flaws, but for potential. - Ellen Goodman

* The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul. - G.K. Chesterton

New Year's Poems

Happy New Year!!

A New Years toast to love and laughter
and happily ever after

A health to you, a wealth to you,
And the best that life can give to you.

Dance as if no one were watching,
Sing as if no one were listening and
Live every day as if it were your last. - Anonymous

Auld Lang Syne

by Robert Burns

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll take a cup o' kindness yet
For auld lang syne

We twa hae run aboot the braes
And pou'd the gowans fine;
we've wander'd mony a weary foot
Sin' auld lang syne

We two hae paidled i' the burn,
Frae mornin' sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar'd
Sin' auld lang syne

And here's a hand, my trusty friend,
And gie's a hand o' thine;
We'll take a cup o' kindness yet
For auld lang syne

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll take a cup o' kindness yet
For auld lang syne

What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That's not been said a thousand times?
The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.
We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.
We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.
We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our prides, we sheet our dead.
We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that's the burden of a year. - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Funny New Year's Resolutions

One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: To rise above the little things. - John Burroughs

* But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year old habits. - Andre Gide

* I do think New Year's resolutions can't technically be expected to begin on New Year's Day, don't you? Since, because it's an extension of New Year's Eve, smokers are already on a smoking roll and cannot be expected to stop abruptly on the stroke of midnight with so much nicotine in the system. Also dieting on New Year's Day isn't a good idea as you can't eat rationally but really need to be free to consume whatever is necessary, moment by moment, in order to ease your hangover. I think it would be much more sensible if resolutions began generally on January the second. - Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary

* He who breaks a resolution is a weakling; He who makes one is a fool. - F. M. Knowles, A Cheerful Year Book

* Every new year people make resolutions to change aspects of themselves they believe are negative. A majority of people revert back to how they were before and feel like failures. This year I challenge you to a new resolution. I challenge you to just be yourself. - Aisha Elderwyn

* For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning. - T. S. Eliot

* Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each New Year find you a better man. - Benjamin Franklin

* Your Merry Christmas may depend on what others do for you. But your Happy New Year depends on what you do for others. - Anonymous

* We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called "Opportunity" and its first chapter is New Year's Day. - Edith Lovejoy Pierce

It is an amusing human observation that we are a bundle of paradoxes and contradictions, shifting so often, that it can be so swift as to exist on an hourly basis. Talk about change your mind. And, every year, when the new year is beginning, we think about "time." We think about how we have wasted it or not enjoyed enough of it to do all things we wanted to do.

TIME

Even a temporal calendar is an attempt to grab a hold of ourselves as if to tame our temperaments. Creating artificial time of the past and the future - rather than living fully awake in the present with a lot less stress - seems to be the curse humanity has called down upon ourselves. It is ludicrous, I mean, who in their right mind chooses to curse themselves? Silly.

THE NEW YEAR

Yet, here we arrive every year at what our calendars deem to be the beginning of THE NEW YEAR, like it's a monster from a scary book. Some look forward to it with delight and anticipation, the optimists, and others, the pessimists, dread it, worrying about the future. Hey, people! It's just a silly calendar! :) Take it in stride, laugh with it, laugh at it, but, most of all: LAUGH - and laugh out loud so the whole world can hear you!

BEST NEW YEARS QUOTE

This quote is so true about human nature it just begged to be moved to the top of the line:

* Making resolutions is a cleansing ritual of self assessment and repentance that demands personal honesty and, ultimately, reinforces humility. Breaking them is part of the cycle. - Eric Zorn

CLOCK TIME

By now you have properly figured out that I don't bother to wear a watch. In fact, as soon as I graduated university quite some time ago (feels like a life time, hmmm... maybe it was...) I put away all my watches and the clocks in every room. As far as I was concerned I was done with "childhood." I made a decision then to follow a spiritual rhythm of the day and night which is basically about getting in tune with Nature, Spirit and the Universe.

NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS

My New Year's resolution? They never quite sat right with me as I make course corrections all year long. There was a time in the personal "ancient" past when I tried to do as everyone else in my culture. What I found is exactly like the quote: I ended up rarely honoring the full resolution, maybe parts of it.

HONORING NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS

Over the years I've often wondered why people have such a tough time with it, struggling as I did too. What I decided - I'm big on deciding what my take is on anything which I suppose that's what creates a writer or blogger - well, I thought the reason we rarely follow through well on those resolutions is because of four annoying facts.

FIRST FACT

The first fact is that we get too grandiose in our goals, creating too many high hurdles for ourselves to achieve.

SECOND FACT

The second fact is that we fail to take those resolutions and break them down into much smaller goals that are easier to achieve.

THIRD FACT

The third fact is we allow those striving for goals to drag on far too long, killing our enthusiasm that began the journey in the first place. Choose goals that can be achieved in short spurts of time like a few days or a few weeks. Once you let it drag on too long it is easy to get discouraged and then you end up abandoning your resolution.

FOURTH FACT

And the fourth fact? Waiting all year long to suddenly make a course correction is like taking an old ruin of a 100 year old house and finally deciding to renovate it and so it becomes a dizzying busy of a money pit.

NEW YEARS ADVICE AND TIPS

Do yourself a favor; make small personal Life corrections all year long and then you can do like my husband and I do at New Years: celebrate how much progress we have made for the year. Instead of piling a "To Do List" onto yourself at the beginning of a new calendar year, celebrate with a "Finished List" like a birthday celebration of good things. That way you celebrate what is best about yourself instead of worrying about what is not perfect. Well, it works for me about reducing daily and cultural stress; I never said I was conventional about my outlook... :)

BE KIND TO YOURSELF TOO

As I collected the New Years quotes, New Years poems, New Years blessing and New Years resolutions I was struck by how overwhelmed people felt by it all. Well, The Delphi Oracle here has solved the problem! Treat yourself kindly, make small personal Life corrections often all year long and then you can breathe a sigh of smug relief when THE NEW YEAR begins!

I like this New Year's Resolution the best:

* Resolve to make at least one person happy every day, and then in ten years you may have made three thousand, six hundred and fifty persons happy, or brightened a small town by your contribution to the fund of general enjoyment. - Sydney Smith