New Year’s Eve 2022 In Westfield: Dinner Specials, Orchestra Concert

WESTFIELD, NJ — If you're spending New Year's Eve in Westfield this year, there are plenty of events happening around town.

The New Jersey Festival Orchestra will perform "Hats Off To Broadway" at Westfield High School on Dec. 31, and Westfield's Historical Society is hosting a raffle fundraiser in which the winner can ring the bell 23 times at midnight in honor of the start of 2023.

Here is a look at some additional events happening around Westfield:

• Fettle + Fare restaurant offers a New Year's Eve menu
• New Year's crafts for kids at Westfield Memorial Library

In the United States, one of the most popular New Year’s Eve traditions is, of course, the dropping of the giant ball in New York City’s Times Square. Various cities have adopted their own iterations of the event — the Peach Drop in Atlanta, the Chick Drop in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and the giant Potato Drop in Boise, Idaho.

The end of one year and beginning of another is often celebrated with the singing of “Auld Lang Syne,” a Scottish folk song whose title roughly translates to “days gone by,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica and History.com.

The history of New Year’s resolutions dates back 8,000 years to ancient Babylonians, who would make promises to return borrowed objects and pay outstanding debts at the beginning of the new year, in mid-March when they planted their crops.

According to legend, if they kept their word, pagan gods would grant them favor in the coming year. If they broke the promise, they would fall out of God’s favor, according to a history of New Year’s resolutions compiled by North Hampton Community College New Center in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Many secular New Year’s resolutions focus on imagining new, improved versions of ourselves. The failure rate of New Year’s resolutions is about 80 percent, according to U.S. News & World Report. There are myriad reasons, but a big one is they’re made out of remorse for gaining weight, for example, and aren’t accompanied by a shift in attitude and a plan to meet the stress and discomfort of changing a habit or condition.