Holidays stare at us expectantly. They are little squares marked off on our calendars, waiting to make demands. They care not for our moods. They do not bother to ask if they've come at a bad time. They have rituals that need to be observed, nee, obeyed. Holidays expect us to feel specific ways, usually some variation on joy. Today is the day to feel thankful, pious, revelrous, patriotic. It doesn't matter how you have experienced those things the other 364. Today's the day. Do it or fail. Love your family right here, right now, or you've blown it.

Holidays have all the absurdity of a heavily armed man pulling us off the street of our day-to-day lives and demanding that we have a special, meaningful experience within the next twelve hours.

(As a side note: If holidays build expectations for a single day to be the most -- for example -- joyful day of the year, then weddings are the ultimate holiday. Forget "This will be the most special day of the year, whether you like it or not." This will be the most special day of your life. Do not. Fuck it up.)

New Year's Eve ought to transcend some of this. It follows a dense period of religious and secular holidays that focus on God and family and capitalism. In place of those lofty ideals New Year's Eve asks only that we indulge ourselves. Whatever stress might have built up while gift shopping or pie baking, let it go, ingest your drug of choice (alcohol is recommended), and have a good time. Whatever film of obligation other recent holidays have plastered onto us, we can rinse it off in the tide of the new year. Release stress. Relax moral standards. Re-up at the bar.

It is a testament to how intensely holidays bear their expectations down on us, the innocent celebrants, that so many people feel pressured even by these generous dicta. One does not have to look far to find someone who feels obliged to be indulgent in an appropriately fabulous way on New Year's Eve. Concerned parties speak of the need to have enough planned revelry. To do something special enough. To do enough, to feel enough, to drink enough.

All religious holidays (and visiting aliens would be hard pressed to pick out Thanksgiving as the secular holiday among the end-of-year cluster) have structure and ritual built into them. There are proscribed activities and, for the most part, a proscribed group of participants. Find your family, whoever that might be, and read the following prayers. While there may well be pressure to fell a special kinship with our kin on such a day, at least there's no pressure to figure out how to feel that kinship. Most likely, the day's activities will resemble last year's, and the year before's. It's up to us to make today special and unique but someone has already given us a manual on how to do just that.

New Year's Eve (and its less obligatory cousin, Halloween) also has demands and as easy as they might be to fulfill (find some friends and hang out) the burden is on us to figure out how to celebrate. And so people feel an additional layer of pressure. Tonight you need to have fun and a two-sentence outline of your activities should sound make it clear, even to a stranger, how much fun you had. "I got together with two friends and we drank and played video games," however much fun that might actually be, will not cut it because it does not sound like enough fun.

In spite of the cleansing aspect of New Year's Eve, there is also a reckoning built in. yes, the opportunity exists to look ahead to the new year but so does the impulse to look back at the old one. New Year's Eve wants us to cut loose, kiss strangers, and embrace the future but it is not above drunkenly whispering in our ear, "Wait, so what did you do last year that was so great?"

That is, it's just another holiday. It's not above having unfair expectations and making demands and insisting on a certain kind of ritual.

But then there's New Year's Day. The awkward holiday in the position of coming after its own celebration. January 1 is the observed holiday, the one we get off from work, but nothing happens. People sleep late and wake up in need of coffee, orange juice, and pizza. Now that is a holiday with low expectations.

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