New Year's Eve 2023 celebrations: fireworks, dancing and frozen duck

Seven writers describe how they started the new year with celebrations big and small.

Just a few days before Earth completes its final orbit around the sun, we asked a group of essayists, novelists and journalists to tell how they would close out 2022 and kick off 2023. Their dispatches, filed on Monday, give a overview of public and private events. moments from around the world: a game of beer pong in Toronto; a culinary misadventure in Los Angeles; crowds of samba dancers in Brasilia; fireworks bursting over rainy Liverpool; an intimate party, complete with soba, in Tokyo; a karaoke night in the New York countryside; and a quiet wedding in a Manhattan apartment.

TORONTO - I never really liked New Year's Eve. I don't drink, and I don't really like being forced to think, and I especially don't like being pushed to improve (especially when the self-improvement in question is increasingly focused on getting me to gym or buy green powder). New Year's is like casual dates or your first month of college: it's like you're supposed to have the best time of your life, but it's also like everyone's having fun better than you.

This year, however, I was back in my hometown after a cross-country move and was looking for some reason to avoid passing at night watching a movie at my parents' house. My friends insisted that I had never given New Year's Eve an honest chance. So, excited by this challenge, I decided to give it my all.

A few friends — one from Montreal, one from Scotland — came to town to celebrate with me. I hadn't lived in Toronto since I was a teenager, so it was like divine intervention that one of the bands I saw at house shows was doing a New Year's Eve set. We went to an indie rock show that turned into a punk show, picking up new people along the way. Then we headed off to a friend-of-a-friend's mysterious house party (after waiting until the host was high enough to let eight strangers into his crowded apartment).

We played beer pong until midnight. I won, but maybe just because I was the only person who didn't drink. Gwen Stefani played as the countdown started, and I kissed my boyfriend when the clock struck 12.

After midnight I toasted everyone for their 2023 predictions (in: flip phones, sincerity, digging a hole in your backyard; out: polyamory, being mean, performative Catholicism). We took the first smoke break of the new year (in: cigarettes; out: vaping), barefoot and shivering in the cold.

On our way home tone changed — we talked about the year that was behind us and the year that lay ahead of us. We felt sad, dark and strange, facing the passage of time during one of the most precarious times we could have known. When we got back to my apartment, we set up makeshift beds in my living room for people who had missed the last train home, and I watched them fall asleep on the floor, I still couldn't believe that was mine. Everything looked new.

— Rayne Fisher-Quann

LOS ANGELES — What could be more festive than spending New Year's Eve getting cursed by a frozen duck?

My family's duck spent a peaceful existence in our freezer until the middle of Christmas Eve dinner, when we, after calmly contemplating how good it was going to be the next evening, had the proper collective heart attack of realizing that the The next day's main course was still covered in ice. But as the end of year celebrations follow one another, any frozen duck originally intended for a party can be used to celebrate something else. So our Christmas duck quickly turned into a New Year's duck who didn't hesitate to listen to Kwanzaa's explanation of this year to my son. All we had to do was get it out of the freezer in time to marinate it in salt, herbs and orange zest before putting it in the oven.

This time, I took the duck out of the freezer two days from the end. While he chilled in our refrigerator, I spent a quiet 10 minutes searching for the New Year's black-eyed peas that I had bought 364 days in advance, having bought them too late the year before. And then I spent...