Tips for the celebration

A perfect start to the new year 2025

(Bild: P. Huber)

New Year's Eve parties are a dime a dozen, making it all the more challenging to turn your own party into a very special event. "Krone" editor Angelika Drnek has given her thoughts on the celebration of celebrations. If you actually follow her humorous suggestions, at least one thing is guaranteed: This New Year's Eve will be one to remember! 

Firecrackers
In times of growing awareness of climate change, rockets and firecrackers should of course be avoided. However, you can be sure that there are some incorrigible people among your neighbors who will still throw half their Christmas money out of the window for the colorful firecrackers. So you don't have to do it yourself. Instead, you can present yourself as a do-gooder and make your immediate surroundings feel guilty. At the height of the fireworks, take a walk around the village, demonstratively put on a face mask and wish your banging neighbors a reproachful-sounding "Cheers!". You can practise this now - it's best to look at a photo of your parents!

Food
Vorarlbergers love their mountain cheese - in all possible states of aggregation. Anyone who moves to the Ländle and suddenly dreams of buying a raclette grill after a few years of getting used to it has made it: finally ghörig! Logically, only rebellious and completely ungovernable subjects do not opt for raclette on New Year's Eve. Fortunately, there aren't that many of them in Vorarlberg anyway, so farmers and dairymen need not fear the New Year. If you want to take a "smart" approach this year, go for veal sausage as a starter. According to government circles, this should sustainably support the dairy industry in the Ländle. A beautiful, perverse (calf) world!

Without any
They really do exist: People who don't like celebrating New Year's Eve. The abstruse arguments of these uncomfortable contemporaries are usually based on a fundamentally negative attitude towards life in general. So what can you do? The best thing to do is to make use of technological achievements such as telecommunications and simply send a "Happy New Year!" or something similar and leave it at that. But if you are one of the grumpy anti-heroes yourself, you can rest assured that they are basically right: New Year's Eve, after Christmas, which is finally over again, is purely a capitalist firework display - and yes, the others basically know this too, but pretend not to.

Drinking
Whether you have invited guests or are starting the countdown on your own: stock your bar! At the turn of the year, we recommend ingredients that make you think of descending into the Abyss before you've even taken a whiff of the drink. Absinthe, for example. Or marzipan cream liqueur. If you want to use the turn of the year to enter a kind of limbo between December 31st and January 1st, these drinks will be an easy choice. If you don't want to be transported out of this world completely, you can help yourself with all kinds of fizzy drinks: High-quality champagne, cheap Prosecco or homemade fizzy drinks - in all three, even the aspirin dissolved in them won't stand out.

Guests
You have to deal with people all year round. Who's going to stop on New Year's Eve? However, to ensure that your guests have a subliminal feeling throughout the evening that they are not actually welcome, we recommend a few easy-to-implement measures: Remove all seating from your home, turn down the heating and only ever smile with your mouth, never with your eyes. It's also more effective than you might think to invite people over who fell out years ago and haven't said a word to each other since. The icy silence will freeze the atmosphere in your home. If you have nerves of steel, you could then suggest a party game. Your sacred peace will be assured.

In any case, we wish you, dear reader, a happy new year. In view of the general news situation, the outlook can make you feel quite queasy, but the omnipresent crises also have their good side: basically, things can only get better. And so the coming year is also an opportunity for a fresh start - on a large and small scale. Please stay with us.
 Sincerely, your "Krone" team.