Ringing in the New Year - A Fantasia for Youth

As I prepare to attend a New Years Eve party, I am faced with all the traditional elements of an adult ring-in-the-new-year event. Is this a formal engagement? Should we bring a side-dish, hors d'oeuvres, a bottle of wine? Are we going to stay late, stay the night, or chance driving home through precarious city festivities and overly-skeptical authorities?

Then I think of past New Years Eve's and am left with the conclusion that I like the eve's of my youth better, especially when they are filled with this:

As a child, my sister and I would stay up until the wee hours of the first day of the new year, watching Disney's Fantasia, dancing from couch to coffee table to sofa and back again, all to the scenes of mischievous Mickey, Hippos in tutus, and other truly fantastic sites and sounds. This film both frightened and amazed me, and was probably one of my first introductions to both classical music and science fiction. For those favors, I am grateful and incredibly fond of those memories.

Wherever you go to celebrate the end of the year and the heralding of the new one, I hope your evening is filled with the joy and youthful dancing that I remember from my childhood in Donnellson, Iowa.

As for this party that I'm attending, I hope there are hippos.

~CW