Making New Year’s resolutions is no way to start a new year. Vowing to get fit, get organized and spend more time with your family is a lot of pressure to put on yourself—and on your family. It’s not that I don’t believe in making New Year’s resolutions, it’s just that I prefer to make mine in late December so that I don’t have to live with them so long.

As a morning person, I don’t think staying out late New Year’s Eve and waking up late and grumpy on New Year’s Day is the best way to start a year either. If I see the new year in at all, it’s because I woke up at midnight to use the bathroom.

Finishing off Christmas treats is another bad way to start a new year. I know how it happens though. You resolve to stop eating junk food, but before you can do that, you have to rid yourself of every unhealthy food item in the house. Naturally the best way to do that is to eat it.

Writing the wrong year on a check is always a bad way to start a new year. You probably don’t think it’s such a big deal and maybe it wasn’t when you wrote 2024 on your first check of the new year. But I wrote 2019 today, and it wasn’t my first check of the new year.

All those together don’t add up to my least favorite way to start a new year: taking down my Christmas decorations. I probably should have done it in December, but I didn’t think it was a good way to end a year either.

So a few days ago, long after half the population had already given up on their New Year’s resolutions, I resolved to take down my tree. It’s never nearly as fun as putting it up and the longer I wait, the worse it gets. I don’t play Christmas music while I work because some years it’s nearly spring by the time I get around to the job. 

I was ahead of schedule this year, but it was still discouraging. I either have more ornaments or fewer boxes than I did when we decorated. Plus I have a tangled-up, twenty-foot strand of mini-twinkle lights, half of which don’t twinkle anymore. But dealing with them was no way to start a new year, so I tossed them in the box in a heap, on the off chance that by next year, I’ll have developed more patience and dexterity. Then my husband wrestled our seven-foot artificial Christmas tree back into its box, quashing any goodwill he had developed over the holidays.

It was not a good way to start a new year, but it had to be done. It wouldn’t be a good way to spend Valentine’s Day either.

So what is the best way to start a new year? I suppose that’s different for everyone. But for me the ideal New Year’s Day would involve waking up early feeling well-rested with no resolutions, no remaining Christmas treats and a closet large enough to store a fully decorated Christmas tree.  

Dorothy Rosby is a blogger and humor columnist whose column appears regularly in publications throughout the West and Midwest. She’s the author of four books of humorous essays all available locally at Mitzi’s Books in Rapid City and on Amazon.