Happy New Year!

                                                                 Happy New Year!

           

            “Five four three two, one happy New Year!”  We all cheered as the clock struck twelve.    The year was two-thousand and eight, and I was spending my new year with my family and friends at Tree Tops ski lodge.   Finally being a “big kid” I was old enough to stay up until midnight that is if I didn’t drift off into sleep.  I was prepared; I had all of the essentials for keeping up.  In other words enough sugar to give every person in the country diabetes.  My brother Stephen, our friend Jake and I were in Jake’s family’s room at the lodge while our parents were down the hall.  It was in the truest sense of the word awesome, as in to eleven year old me, I was in shock. 

            Every hour seemed as long as day and I could hear the sandman beckoning me to enter his realm of dreams.  I snapped back in to the world of the awake, trying to free myself of my comfortable prison of a bed.  “Sugar, I need sugar.” I needed to stay awake as if my very life depended on it.  The clock read ten thirty, “another hour and a half to go” I told myself.  Stephen and Jake were playing cards or something, and I was gorging on sweets like a homeless mutt in an IAMS factory.  Time passed and we made a pillow fort.  “Eleven thirty! Only half an hour left! I can do this.”  A gallon of Mountain Dew later and I was more wired than a super computer.  We turned on Dick Clark and watched the record for the longest motorcycle jump be broken.  “Just five more minutes!” I was rearing with anticipation.  I went out to the snow –capped balcony and looked out to the horizon of our little lodge town.  I saw the most beautiful lights reflecting off of the snow, I’ll never forget that image.  As I stepped back in to the room so I didn’t get frostbite, our countdown had almost come to a close.  “Five, four, three, two, one.  Happy New Year!”  Cheers erupted from all throughout the hotel.  From the guys in the hot tub outside, to our parents down the hall. 

            I’ll never forget that feeling, that feeling of pure excitement.  My patience had finally paid off; I made it to the New Year.  I think I slept for maybe an hour that night, I was so wound up from the sugar and the cheering that I couldn’t bring myself to sit still for a few minutes, let alone lay in bed for hours.  I’ll never forget that night.