The surprise guests came in fours, and they were dressed up as beer glasses. Shortly before eleven on New Year’s Eve, they stormed into the living room of our holiday home on Föhr with a loud “Moin!” Then they lined up in front of our fondue set and sang party songs they had composed themselves. We vacillated between amusement (quaint, those islanders!) and shock (what do you offer four singing beer glasses?).
Ten minutes later the door opened again and Maya the Bee and her friends hummed in. Your lyrics revolved around bees and flowers. They cast covetous glances at our wine glasses and suspiciously at the living beer glasses. At five to twelve my husband had three new best buddies. The women showed me how to mix Primitivo with Prosecco (“delicious, rosé”) and explained Frisian New Year customs to me. It was the perfect turn of the year: nothing planned, hardly anything prepared, lots of fun.
At the other end of the fun scale is the totally screwed up romantic New Year’s Eve that I wanted to celebrate with my boyfriend at the time many years ago. Ten overpriced king prawns lost their lives senselessly because we already had a fundamental argument with the starter. I thought the shrimp deserved a prettier sight than an unshaven guy in a tie-dye shirt. He found me shallow. Conclusion: planned for days, overdrawn account, separated in the new year. What is the columnist trying to tell me? I hear you grumble. Wine on beer, I advise you? Everything will be different with the next man?
No, something else: plan less, let more come. Expect less, allow more surprises. Because what’s right for New Year’s Eve parties isn’t wrong for the other 364 days of the year either: life always has pretty gifts in store for us. But it makes fun of fooling us.
That’s why it usually hides them in places where we don’t expect them to be. On the other hand, if we want to make something by any means necessary—big feelings and big backdrops—then it’s like a Hollywood star being asked for his plastic surgeon’s number. It’s like the saying in English: big gifts come in small packages.
The best celebrations, the life-changing encounters, the overwhelming insights or the most intense conversations – they all rarely come about if we first go to the day spa or brush our fingernails a trendy mud color. It’s more because we quickly take out the garbage on a Tuesday evening and run into our neighbor’s exciting brother.
In any case, I met my husband in a dingy kitchen, I usually get my best ideas for novels while scrubbing my bathtub, and my children still rave about the time they were allowed to eat their evening meal while sitting in the paddling pool. Plan less, let more happen – if I have one resolution for the coming year, it’s this one. If you want a surprise visit, you must not lock the door. Not even in front of Föhrer singers in beer glass and bee costumes.
