"Happy New Year," we shout as the clock strikes 12 on Dec. 31, but what’s really new about Jan. 1? After all, winter only officially began about a week ago and all we’ve got to look forward to for the next few months is more of the same.

The first day of Spring, the beginning of nature’s season of reawakening, would seem to be a more logical time to herald the beginning of a New Year. In fact, the ancient Babylonians had enough sense to begin their new calendar on the day following the first full moon to appear after the Vernal Equinox. It remained pretty much that way until the Romans started to mess around with the calendar and eventually Julius Caesar settled matters by decreeing that the New Year would begin on Jan. 1. There is no astronomical significance to justify the choice. It was one of those purely arbitrary decisions that governments get to make. Sort of like the way we now move holidays around to create three-day weekends.

Well, be that as it may, wherever we find ourselves at the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, we’re expected to be a good sport about it all and wish "Happy New Year" to all those around us.

I can’t actually put a date on the first New Year’s Eve I remember. It had to be sometime in the late 1920s when I was a small boy. My parents were having a party in the house where I grew up in Bergenfield and I recall being sent up to my own room where I lay in bed, listening to the sound of voices and laughter drifting up, like the muffled soundtrack of a movie seeping through the wall from the next auditorium. Eventually I got out of bed and crept halfway down the stairs where I sat in my pajamas peeking through the rungs of the banister at the adults below. Look – someone laughed – there’s Edward. But instead of chasing me back to bed, mom and dad said I could come down and say hello to the guests and even sit on the living room couch for awhile. I figured if I kept real quiet they might forget about me and I might even get to stay up until midnight but, as dad told me later, I fell asleep by 10 and he carried me back up to bed.

There have been many New Year’s Eves since then but most of them have faded into memory like yellowing photos in a family album that you neglected to date. There were, for example, all those New Year’s Eves when the party, no matter how boisterous, would grow hushed as midnight neared and everyone listen to the radio while Ben Grauer counted down the seconds from Times Square and then Guy Lombardo and His Orchestra made it official by playing Auld Lang Syne.

And there were those New Year’s Eves – two of them I think – when we were in Times Square ourselves, caught up in the crowd that carried you along as if you were flotsam in an incoming tide. And there were even a couple of times we stayed up all night and had breakfast in the morning at a diner. I don’t remember what year any of those were, just that we were much younger.

There is, however, among all those dateless New Year’s Eves, one that has been indelibly dated and time stamped in my mind. That was when the page was turned at midnight from 1943 to 1944. We had been married in July – Dolores and I – and we danced that old year away to the music of Eddy Howard and his Orchestra at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, clinging to each other and to the moment because, like for so many young couples that year, the only thing the New Year promised was uncertainty. The following New Year’s Eve I was somewhere in the Pacific and the one after that I was stranded in San Diego waiting for rail transportation back to the East Coast and discharge from the service.

Since then, while I may have forgotten what I did on most of those New Year’s Eves that followed, I’ve never had trouble finding a girl to kiss at the stroke of midnight. The same one, the one I danced with on that New Year’s Eve in Chicago so long ago, has been there at my side for every one since. Of course we don’t party much anymore and I may have to wake her up for that kiss. She tends to fall asleep now while we watch television.

And so, Happy Jan. 1 and best wishes for the New Year to you and yours.