A Horse of a Different Color

The Friday Newsletter embraces the return of the first Saturday in May

New Year’s Eve is a classic example of a good concept with poor execution.

The idea of staging an entire hours-long revelry around an event that only really takes a couple of minutes to happen? That’s very clever. It gives a thin pretense for celebration, but then wisely gets out of the way of said celebration. The event time is almost entirely buildup; people gather with a purpose, but that purpose is something later, something to anticipate.

When the event—in this case, the ball drop—finally does happen, it’s a good sign that people should start winding things down and head home. (I’m not twenty-one any more, and I believe in parties having end times.)

Those two minutes—and let’s be real, if it’s a good party, no one looks at the TV until 11:58 or so when someone yells out “it’s almost time!”—those two minutes inspire hours of fun, and they come with a signature drink, an elevated dress code and even a jaunty little theme song you can belt along to when you’ve had a few too many of th…