But there are the odd folks – what is normalcy, anyway? – who find no reason to join the festive mood. One lot may have ‘ideological’ reasons to find anything ‘Western’ that has been universalised – whether the prevalent Julian calendar or the defunct Gregorian one – to be worth a scoff, rather than a bash. Another lot are more philosophically inclined, maintaining the stoic position of treating December 31, 2022, segueing into January 1, 2023, as nothing but a false door, with the end of one Earthly chakkar around the Sun cycle and the start of another amounting to nothing but ‘another day’. But for the half-hearted, there’s always one more halfway choice. As the caption of an old New Yorker cartoon depicting a couple in their living room during a December 31 evening has it, ‘I don’t care about the New Year, but I really love the excitement around it.’ That should be good enough for potential New Year deniers and party poopers tonight.