Tag: new-year

Resolutions are so overrated

“Tonight’s December thirty-first,
Something is about to burst …
Hark, it’s midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year!”

—Ogden Nash, (1902 – 1971) American poet declared by The New York Times as the country’s best-known producer of humorous poetry.

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“Well, I’ve completed my New Year’s resolutions,” a buddy bragged last week.

“Resolutions are so overrated,” I reacted. “They just go in one ‘year’ and out the other.”

I laughed. I thought it was funny. Popping off, however, compelled me to start thinking about some sort of, let’s say, focus, for the new year.

Resolving to make it through another year with a smile and being here this time next year for a progress report is a fantastic focus for any year. Iconic comedian Groucho Marx said it best when he was reportedly asked in an interview what he hoped people would say about him a hundred years from now.

He responded, “I hope they say, ‘Boy, doesn’t he look good for his age?’”

It was also Groucho who said in possibly one of the very few serious quotes he was credited with, “I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.”

Honestly, who does not want to live a long and happy life? Probably no one … except maybe for one of my relatives that comes to mind. Just ask him how he is doing, and he will likely growl, “Well, I was in a good mood this morning, but I am about to get over it.”

Some say he’s not grumpy, just being funny. Really? You should meet him.

A few years ago, I sent said relative a book I enjoyed. Written by UCLA postdoctoral researcher Alex Korb, “The Upward Spiral” validates my thoughts on the rewards of happiness. Korb says that listening to music from the happiest times of our past becomes our happiness in the present because we embrace music associated with intense emotional life experiences.

A happiness seeker as long as I can remember, my happiest memories have always been moments in music. Listening to it, studying it, making it, thinking about it. I can’t be involved with music and be unhappy.

My Uncle Bill, my mom’s baby brother, personified that musical theory long before Kolb’s book appeared in print. And, no, Uncle Bill is not the grumpy relative. He’s the life and humor of every family reunion. He’s also the one who taught me a fun music game many years ago.

Get a bunch of people together and start playing music from your younger years. Encourage every person to share the memories each song evokes. The city where they first heard the tune. The car they were driving at the time. The girl or guy they were dating. Smiles and laughter will be spontaneous.

Uncle Bill’s music game supports another of Korb’s happiness theories. Smile. Smile when you are happy. Smile when you’re not happy. Smile all the time.

“Why would I want to do that,” my aforementioned grumpy relative once asked.

Mom had the answer for that. “Smile! It makes everyone wonder what you’ve been up to.”

According to Korb,“ The brain isn’t always very smart.” The author contends that it responds to the world around us, sorting through random information and looking for clues on how to react. Therefore, when you smile, even when you aren’t happy, smiling fools the brain into thinking you must, in fact, be happy after all. Causing it to send happy signals, even though you really feel otherwise.

So, for 2026, I resolve to keep on enjoying my favorite music, beckoning to those intense emotional memories that keep me smiling, convincing my brain that I’m happy all the time, and keeping everyone wondering … “What is he up to.”

Then what remains, to quote Groucho one last time, “Getting older is no problem. You just have to live long enough.”

So, “Duck, here comes another year!” With it comes my wish for us all. For a happy, blessed, and prosperous year.

Especially for my aforementioned crabby relative.

—Leon Aldridge

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Aldridge columns are featured in these publications: The Center Light and Champion, The Mount Pleasant Tribune, the Rosenberg Fort Bend Herald, the Taylor Press, the Alpine Avalanche,  the Fort Stockton Pioneer, the Elgin Courier, The Monitor in Naples, and Motor Sports Magazine.

© Leon Aldridge and A Story Worth Telling 2026. Excerpts and links may be used, provided full and clear credit is given to Leon Aldridge and ‘A Story Worth Telling’ with appropriate and specific directions to the original content.

May good fortune outlast our resolutions

 “We’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet, for auld lang syne.”
— Robert Burns, “Auld Lang Syne”

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That 1700s Scots poem set to familiar music is often used to mark the end of something. In our culture, usually another year “for (the sake of) old times.”

“Auld Lang Syne” became a U.S. tradition after Canadian bandleader Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians orchestra played it on New Year’s Eve in 1929 during a radio broadcast at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.

But a few years before that, on New Year’s Day in 1920, my father’s parents began what would become 47 years of marriage. S.V. Aldridge took as his bride, Hattie Lois Farmer. She became the family wise woman of philosophy and old sayings, for the new year, and all occasions. Prognostication regarding luck and life was almost an art form for my grandmother. Something for which I suspect she relied on a tad of tradition, a smidge of superstition, and a lot on the Lord. She was a devout member of the First Methodist Church in Pittsburg for more than 60 years.

She was born in Aledo, Texas in 1905 and was 15 when she married. He was born in Natchez, Mississippi in 1888 and was 31 when he said, “I do.” By then, he had worked for the railroad since the age of 13 and recently served with the U.S. Army in France during WW I.

Ten years later, my father was seven years old when they moved to Pittsburg in Northeast Texas, where my grandparents lived in the same house for the rest of their lives. For him, that was until 1967. For her, 1993.

Life was different a hundred years ago. Their age difference was not that uncommon then. And their education, for the most part, came more from experience than from schoolbooks.

As each year drew to a close, she shared her philosophies to inform everyone in the family about what was in store for the new year, according to Hattie Aldridge.

Her pivotal piece of providence was eating for prosperity. New Year’s dinner included black-eyed peas, cabbage, and delicacies dedicated to ensuring good luck and financial fortune. Truthfully, I was a fan of peas and cabbage any day at her house if they came with cornbread and iced tea.

Weather forecasts were also part of her New Year’s admonitions. On her Cardui calendar, she noted the weather every day for the first 12 days. These notes became her forecasting tool for each of the next 12 months. If New Year’s Day was stormy, cloudy, or cold, then bad weather was in store for the first month of the New Year. Rain on the third meant March would be wet. It seemed a really fascinating substitute for science until the year snow fell on the eighth. And, no — it did not snow in August that year.

She also swore that the first person entering your home on January 1 would strongly influence your life in the new year. And it was especially good fortune if that first visitor was bearing a gift or something good to eat. Well, yes! I’ve always thought that any day someone came to my house with gifts or food, or both, was a good day.

Another piece of advice was never do laundry on New Year’s Day. No how, no way. She said I it was bad luck. Dirty clothes would wait until January 2. But she also held that it was bad luck to labor with laundry on any Monday. She died having never owned a washing machine. “Doing the laundry” for her meant a couple of number three wash tubs, a scrub board, and a clothesline.

In my book, that would constitute lousy luck for any day I dealt with dirty clothes.

Looking back, our good fortune today is that, in many ways, life is immensely better than it was then. Or, as my good friend Oscar Elliott used to say, “These are the good old days.”

With your New Year’s traditions, I wish you a happy and prosperous 2025. Enjoy your black-eyed peas and cabbage, check the weather, and may that first visitor bring you good cheer and a small gift … and do your laundry.

And “for (the sake of) old times,” I also wish for all of us that our good fortune in the new year lasts longer than our resolutions.

—Leon Aldridge

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Aldridge columns are featured in The Mount Pleasant Tribune, the Rosenberg Fort Bend Herald, the Alpine Avalanche,  the Fort Stockton Pioneer, and Granite Media Partners publications including the Taylor Press, the Elgin Courier and others. Also in The Monitor in Naples, and Motor Sports Magazine.

© Leon Aldridge and A Story Worth Telling 2024. Excerpts and links may be used, provided full and clear credit is given to Leon Aldridge and ‘A Story Worth Telling’ with appropriate and specific directions to the original content.