Cleo asked at breakfast if we could drive to Times Square for New Year’s, and I had to sit her down with a clementine and explain, calmly, why we cannot ever willingly stand underneath a quarter ton of falling microplastic.
A Facebook group I trust, “Confetti Is Not a Food Group But They’re Acting Like It,” has been tracking the Times Square drop for almost a decade. The number that comes up over and over is three thousand pounds. Three thousand pounds of dyed polyester squares, treated with a flame retardant so the building doesn’t catch, released over a crowd of open-mouthed singing toddlers at precisely 12:00:01 a.m. They call it a celebration. I call it Tuesday in the lungs of every four-year-old in Midtown.
My neighbor Marlene — bless her, she lives ten doors down and runs on Diet Mountain Dew and unearned confidence — texted me last night to say she’d dropped a self-addressed stamped envelope into a Times Square gift shop request bin so they’d “mail her a souvenir handful.” For her son. Who is four. She thinks this is whimsical. I think she just paid the United States Postal Service to deliver flame retardant.
My sister-in-law Tara, who works the front desk at a pediatric office in Knoxville and is functionally a nurse at this point, told me over Marco Polo that the confetti is also coated in something called a “release agent” so the pieces don’t clump in the chute. A release agent. I asked her what was in it and she said, “Honey, I don’t know, but it’s not olive oil.” That was enough for me.
We do our own confetti here at the homestead. I dry marigold petals in September, store them in mason jars in the pantry next to the elderberry, and the kids and I scatter them off the porch at 9 p.m. — our agreed-upon Mountain New Year, because midnight is a Manhattan construct and my children are asleep by then. The petals compost into the lawn. The lawn thanks me by giving me more marigolds. This is what they used to call a cycle, before chemistry got involved.
Marlene’s actual NYE plan is to sit her four-year-old in front of a livestream of the ball drop and hand him a “Kid Safe Confetti Popper” from the Dollar Tree, which I looked up and which contains, in addition to the polyester squares, something called PEG-40 hydrogenated castor oil. I read the ingredient list to my husband out loud and he said, “That sounds like a kind of gasoline,” and I said, “That’s because it is, sweetheart, that’s exactly what it is.”
I’m not trying to be the lady on the block who ruins New Year’s. I just think there’s a reason the Times Square crowd files out of there at 1 a.m. looking gray. They don’t know. Nobody told them. Their bodies are quietly processing a year’s worth of polyester glitter overnight and they think it’s the champagne. My midnight toast will be raw goat-milk kefir, a teaspoon of local raw honey, and a quiet Yes to the year ahead. Marlene’s toast will be Costco sparkling cider, which lists “natural flavors” without saying which ones, which as far as I’m concerned makes it a chemistry experiment in a tuxedo bottle.
She’ll wake up tomorrow with a headache and call it the cider. I’ll wake up tomorrow with marigold petals in the porch cracks and call that the year. We can’t all be ready for January 1st. Some of us just have to be ready for the next minute.