New Year's Eve

Growing up we always spent New Year's Eve in church. The service started at 11:00 p.m. It was called a watch-night service. And basically it was similar to the Thanksgiving service -- where people could share their blessings with others, and then there was a time of prayer just prior to midnight. After the service was over we all went down to the church basement (now called a fellowship hall, but back then it was the basement) and we feasted on food prepared by the church women. No matter how young we were, or how tired we were we went to this service and fellowship time afterward.

I know when I was a teenager I really wanted to be somewhere else, but being the preacher's kid, I wasn't permitted to go to anyone else's "party."

After I met my husband, and he was whisked off to Kenya with his parents, the New Year's Eve service was again something I enjoyed because I would try to envision what Alan was doing in Kenya at that time -- even though he was eight hours ahead of us.

After we married and moved away from Runnemede we never found a church which had a watch-night service. One of the churches we attended had a game night and food fest on New Year's Eve, but most people left before midnight.

Now, Alan and I are elderly (that's my granddaughter's term) people who are in bed well before the ball drops, snoozing away by midnight when the year changes. If we aren't asleep yet, there's enough fireworks around here to keep us awake for a while after midnight. This is the south, after all, and fireworks are common at most holiday celebrations.