What is the moratorium on wishing people a “Happy New Year”? Of course, in the wake of the past week in Los Angeles, anyone greeting their fellow Angelenos with a hearty, “Happy New Year!” would be rightly met with something less than amusement. Still, by January 5th, it already felt somewhat ridiculous to greet people that way. Sure, I was still writing “2003” on my checks, but what I started to do that day, and continued into this past week, until fire changed everything, was to ask people if they had a good New Year’s. This actually led to some meaningful exchanges, rather than a perfunctory (if heartfelt) exchange of pleasantries. For example, a couple of individuals I was meeting for the first time, when I inquired about their New Year’s, actually opened up honestly about the lack of fun they had on either New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day.

One such person was the agent who assisted us at Newark Liberty Airport. We had to check our bags and check in and pay for Fuzz Aldrin. Fuzz is our 13 year-old cat, and she is both a frequent flyer, and a far less white-knuckle passenger than I am. The agent responded to my inquiry about her holiday by confessing that it had been anything but enjoyable, and made it clear that this lack of enjoyment was due to her job. I expressed my sympathies and told her that we certainly appreciated her efforts. This simple exchange had the effect of transforming her brusque and understandably no-nonsense demeanor. From that point forward, she expressed great warmth and a desire to be of assistance in any way she could. Sometimes, it doesn’t take much in our interactions with our fellow human beings to make even the most transactional or bureaucratic of exchanges memorable.

Obviously, for millions of people in this battered and beaten City of Angels, the New Year has brought unbelievable sadness. It’s a sadness felt by many millions more around the globe, who out of affection for our city, for its inhabitants, or simply out of that human condition that there will never be too much of – compassion – are suffering along with us. In truth, for much of my life, every New Year brought sadness. During my formative years, the end of the holidays meant the return to school and its long days of schoolwork with scant hours of sunshine to enjoy alone or in the company of friends. A Sisyphean dread continued to accompany the turning of the calendar from one year to the next well into my adulthood. A “here we go again” weariness matched by an “is that all there is” dissatisfaction with the holiday just past, were my emotional companions each year, as I prepared to push that 365 or 366 day boulder around the sun once again.

There were two major reasons why I was able to turn things around and become someone who looks forward to January. One was realizing that I had been celebrating Christmas all wrong. All through the years of my upbringing, the holiday season peaked with Christmas morning. It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized that the holiday was the start of Christmas’ twelve days. The wise men started their journey then and did not bestow their gifts until the Twelfth Night. Somehow, having New Year’s Eve fall halfway through those twelve days gave the New Year a deeper significance than merely a chronological turning of the page. No journey has ended on December 31, and no matter how many resolutions I might make, no journey is beginning. Come January 1, I am closer to Twelfth Night, and therefore closer to the start of Epiphany. As such, it’s a cause for celebration, but it’s not nearly as significant to me as the personal epiphanies that now flow to me in the days that follow. Even the gift-giving aspect of Christmas has changed. Because in all non-pandemic years, my wife and I now spend Christmas on the east coast with her family, we save much of our gift exchange for the New Year, when we are alone together, along with Fuzz, in Los Angeles.

The other cause for my now looking forward to January is, silly as it might sound, movies. After the obligations and frivolities of the holiday season are behind me, I can finally buckle down and get to the work that means a great deal to me: Catching up on the best cinematic offerings of the previous year. Awards voting comes fast and furious in the New Year, and I always desire to have a truly representative list of the best of the previous year to share on an end-of-January episode of the free weekly show I have co-hosted for almost eighteen years. And now, once the cineaste pleasures of January are behind me, I plunge into February, a month that is home to my wedding anniversary. Couple that anniversary with Valentine’s Day a few days prior and it has the makings of one seriously romantic month!

This year, no sooner than the romance of February is in the rearview mirror, will March bring a first-ever trip to Venice, Italy, for my wife and myself. Fuzz will stay stateside for that trip because after Venice, we head to Copenhagen, for our first visit to Denmark, a visit we will share with our dearest of friends, the Lawlors, and a visit that will culminate in all of us attending the wedding of my longtime partner, Dean Haglund, to his longtime love, Patti Paquette. The wedding will take place on St. Patrick’s Day at Kronborg Castle, known throughout much of the world as the Elsinore castle made famous by Hamlet. From Copenhagen, Lily and I will travel to Tromsø, a city more than 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. This “Gateway to the Arctic” is apparently also referred to as the “Paris of the North”, though I don’t know how many cities are situated far enough north to rival that claim. I do know that whereas Paris is called the “City of Light” because of its role in the Enlightenment, its history of urban lighting and its beautiful nighttime illuminations, the lights we will be seeking in Tromsø will be the Northern Lights. We will also be there to pay respects to the land of my father’s ancestors, and our journey will conclude in Oslo.

Come May there will be two graduations in the family, one for my nephew at TCU, and the other for my niece at St. Andrew’s School in Delaware (known to film aficionados as the filming location for 1989’s Dead Poets Society). By June, I hope I will have hosted two live “Viva Los Feliz” shows, and June itself will bring celebrations of both my wife’s birthday and the start of summer, which we will ring in by splitting our time between Los Feliz and Montecito. In other words, it’s shaping up to be a memorable first half of 2025, and by the time the calendar turns to July, it will be time to start planning for the holidays! Of course, the events of the past week laid waste to many plans for 2025 and beyond, so each of us always shares the same challenge, to move in the direction of plans that hopefully fill us with enthusiasm, while as gracefully as possible embracing that which life brings forward. Those events might also be a reminder that we probably shouldn’t ever let ourselves feel stress where our plans or planning is concerned.

In fact, the stress of trying to plan New Year’s Eve celebrations almost always served to diminish my enjoyment of the holiday. I always felt so much pressure to celebrate in some special way that would prove different from how I celebrated my life the other 364 (or 365) nights of the year. Occasionally, amidst the parties and black tie affairs, a truly memorable New Year’s might sneak in there, like in 2011, when China Forbes returned from her recovery after throat surgery to join Pink Martini at the Disney Concert Hall. Still, for all the planning and travel and effort that went into so many New Year’s Eves, sometimes the most memorable ones happened almost by accident. One year, back in the 90s, I was driving with my pal, Steve Lem, either to or from somewhere on the west side. We had probably seen a movie, and probably had dinner beforehand. We were probably headed to have drinks somewhere. All I remember for sure, is that we saw a crowd gathered on “Little” Santa Monica Blvd. All assembled were gazing upwards for some reason and shortly after we passed them by, the realization hit me. I veered to the side, threw the car into park and sprinted to join the crowd.

They were gathered beneath the Smoking Deaths sign that had stood there since 1987. It’s a tote board, keeping track of how many people have died from smoking in a year. We would know that midnight had struck and a new year was beginning because the display would return to “zero” deaths, and sure enough, when that happened, there was great rejoicing in the streets. It was OUR ball drop! How fun to spontaneously find myself in the midst of such good cheer, until a short while had passed and the number “1” appeared on the board, indicating that the first smoking death of the New Year had been registered. A sober quiet fell upon all of us with a heavy immediacy. Yet despite this almost-instant letdown, gathering at that digital display sign has apparently become not only a community celebration, but a viral sensation as well. And why not? After all, the sooner we can say, “Out with the old and in with the … Old,” the better I suppose.

The last two New Year’s Eves have been among my all-time favorites, because they simply involved spending time in with Lily and Fuzz, and our friends Jon and Kelly Lawlor. Getting to hug these folks (and Fuzz, and the Lawlors dog, Islay) at midnight is to celebrate a lot of what matters most to me. Honestly, I don’t need more than that, though this year, I did get more, because we celebrated at Mike Stewart’s pad in the upper east side of Manhattan. Mike and I have been friends for going on 53 years now and getting to sit with him on New Year’s Eve, as we quietly hoped to hear that his ice maker was actually making the ice that would prove necessary for a second round of Black Manhattans, was exactly where I should be. He recollected that 25 years earlier, on the precipice of Y2K, which was wrongly being celebrated as the start of a new millennium that would, in fact, not start until January 1, 2001 (though no one likes a math geek), we were together at a party he threw in San Francisco. The two nights could not have been more different. That party twenty-five years earlier boasted hundreds of guests, and unlike our discouraging dearth of ice cubes on this New Year’s Eve, at that party, Mike filled his two-car garage wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with ice. What both events had in common was that the highlight for me was getting to be with him.

As midnight approached, we went around the room, discussing whether or not we had any resolutions or intentions for the coming year. I found myself saying that I want, so much as it is within my power, to enjoy everyone I encounter, no matter what energy they might be embodying, feeling they might be expressing, or tone they are using while doing it. This will not be easy, but hence the part “so much as it is within my power”. And the more I am able to do it, the more I might find that the ability to enjoy people IS my power.

Certainly last week, watching the Sunset Fire from our roof, while wondering how long we would be without electrical power was frightening and stressful. Yet, I truly enjoyed sharing that fear and that stress with my neighbors. Our neighborhood might be threatened, but our sense of community can grow stronger. If we want it to.

Last year, I found that I wanted; again so much as it was within my power, to help my elders enjoy themselves. And I wanted to help those younger than me to feel good about themselves. The epiphany that came to me late in the year was that I want to encourage my peers to take care of themselves. A necessary part of providing that encouragement is to be seen as someone who takes care of himself! Indeed, the question of how I want to feel moving forward has been foremost on my mind - even where my creative goals or intentions are concerned. For the epiphany that struck me in the first few days of this year was that my creative health is inextricably linked to my physical health. And I am happy to say that I start 2025 feeling the best I have in at least a couple years.

Much of Los Angeles, and many of its communities are hurting. For some, this is far from their first experience of catastrophe. When Leigh McCloskey, a wonderful artist, philosopher and actor performed Lily and my wedding, he used his homily to describe his experience of fighting to save his home during the 2018 Malibu fire, and he spoke of the importance of, metaphorically, sitting in the fire together. This week, he wrote about the impermanence of all things, and offered the following to those in our communities who have suffered so much devastating loss:

Loss, death and catastrophe teaches always the same values – to love your family, honor your friends, bless your community, and kiss the land that you live on. Also, hug your furry friends.

I guess when we say “out with the old” each and every New Year, we are reminding ourselves of the impermanence of all things. We don’t know what the future will hold, but for at least a magical few minutes that night, we know it holds the promise for beauty. We won’t know the full toll these fires have taken on people’s lives, on nature, on wildlife and more for quite some time, but it is all right to wonder what beauty might someday exist in this world because of what happened. Nothing will make it all right, of course. None of us would wish for this. Still, the world we enter into has the possibility of being more beautiful than the one we left behind. If nothing else, it will be interesting to see what crops spring up out of the ashes.

During the final months of 2024, the death of my sister notwithstanding, I felt my ambition returning after an absence of … I don’t know how long. It’s an ambition that flows in many directions, and yet, I found myself telling my wife this week that no matter what undertakings I endeavor to pursue or accomplish, they will all be taking a backseat to whatever I can do for this city. Lily spent many years getting up every morning and letting this city know why she was here. Why now would I want to spend a day here without trying to help my neighbors, my neighborhood, my city, in some way?

The epiphanies keep coming you see, even some two weeks after New Year’s. And with each one, I attempt to release the old and welcome the new.

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