I have a love/hate relationship with Champagne. Ever since the New Year’s Eve dinner party I threw for my high school friends during my sophomore year in college, it’s been a long road to gain comfort drinking bubbly.

An evening of cooking, celebrating and reminiscing with friends–as we ushered in the start of 1984–turned into a memorable night of not only getting sick, but also experiencing the worst hangover of my life, during which I had to take an airplane.

I’ll never forget the waiting time in the airport terminal, where my grandmother doted on me, wiping my forehead and urging me to drink water. It’s hard to imagine a dainty 80-year-old woman nursing her college-age grandkid after a a night of too much partying, but that’s the kind of grandmother she was.

At least five years went by before I could even be near a glass of champagne, and many more passed before I could get my lips to touch a glass of it. Champagne has always been representative—for many—of New Year’s Eve, but I happily did without it.

Eventually, New Year’s Eve took on a new importance in my life. Not because I was growing more comfortable cradling a champagne flute in between my first and second fingers, but because it is the night I met my husband, at a New Year’s Eve party. It’s important to mention that he dated a friend of mine before it was my turn, and exactly one year later—on New Year’s Eve—we started dating. The rest is history.

Each year, we look forward to celebrating—not just the start of a new calendar year, but another year that we’ve been together. We’ve celebrated in some far-flung places and also in the coziness of our home. We’ve sipped wine and drank beer to ring in the New Year, and little by little, I’ve eased my way back to appreciate the flavor, glamour and buzz of a glass of Champagne. Minus the hangover.

Caren Osten Gerszberg is a co-founder/editor of the Drinking Diaries. You can see a selection of her work at www.carenosten.com, and follow her on twitter: @carenosten

Note: This post was originally published in 2010

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by Helene Stapinski

Every year it’s the same drill. Our family and friends ask, “So what are you doing for New Year’s Eve?” and we always answer, “Staying in our pajamas.”

It wasn’t always that way.

Years ago, back in the early 90s, we tried to go out. We really did.

There were the parties, where people either threw up or passed out, or both. We tried parties at our place, but people either threw up or passed out, or both.

There was the time I tried to go to Times Square, and had to maneuver through the underground subway tunnels to get by the police barricades and drunken fools lining the streets. There was the year we went for a fancy prix fixe dinner in SoHo. We got dressed up and drank champagne and blew noise makers and had a fun time. But when we got the bill, we felt like patsies.

There was the night we went out with my best friend Sara and had a good time. But on the way home, a belligerent drunk called my husband an asshole.

My husband, who never loses his temper, lost his temper. He grabbed the guy by the lapels and threw him on the hood of a car right there on Sixth Avenue, as I stood there screaming. All the guy really needed was a gentle push and he would have gone down; he was that plastered.

That was the last time we ever went out for New Year’s Eve. Sara still hasn’t recovered. And neither have I.

My husband and I like to drink. We consider ourselves professionals. Experts, if you will. We go to the oldest, most sophisticated bars and hotel lounges to sip $15 martinis. We love to make cocktails at home in Brooklyn — complicated creations involving absinthe and orange blossom water and maraschino cherries (not all inthe same drink usually).

But we know how to hold our liquor. We know when we’ve had enough, and we don’t pick fights with people on the street.

New Year’s Eve is amateur night. The streets and bars and restaurants and cabs are filled with people who don’t don’t know what they’re doing, and who don’t usually drink — or drink Schlitz out of a beer bong maybe. They’re the people who wear baseball caps instead of neckties to those sophisticated lounges and talk too loudly at the bar.

These people are not serious drinkers like we are. They don’t appreciate a finely made ice cube or a high-end, meaty olive. New Year’s Eve — much like St. Patrick’s Day — is their night. We leave it to them. Bottoms up. Cin-cin.

For the past two decades, we have refused to leave the house on New Year’s Eve. (Just as I refuse to go into Manhattan on St. Patrick’s Day). We put on our flannels, turn on some cocktail music, then have a couple of Old Fashioneds. We make kid cocktails for our children – orange juice, ginger ale and maraschino cherries in tiki mugs. Then whip up a cheese fondue, followed by a chocolate fondue, then drink a little bit more. Some champagne or an after-dinner snort perhaps.

Dick Clark is too depressing. And Carson Daly? No thanks. We watch Woody’s Allen’s love letter to 1940s New York, “Radio Days,” which ends with a touching New Year’s Eve moment on the roof of one of our favorites, the King Cole Bar. The best scene, though, is when  one of the characters runs out of the house in his boxers, terrorizing the neighborhood with a meat cleaver.

“That’s what Daddy is like when we go out on New Year’s Eve,” I tell the kids. They laugh and laugh.

We don’t wait for the ball to drop, and are in deep REM by midnight.  I go to sleep slightly toasted and listen as the fireworks and horns in the harbor blend into my pleasant dreams, ushering in another new year.

Note: This post originally appeared in 2010.

Helene Stapinski is the author of the bestselling memoir Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History, and Baby Plays Around: A Love Affair, with Music.  She has written articles for The New York Times, New York magazine, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure and Salon. To read other essays written by Helene Stapinski, click here.

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by Jacquelyn Mitchard

1. Start drinking early in the afternoon on Christmas Eve. Come out of the bedroom in a Santa Claus bikini at midnight. After you pass out, forget Santa. Send the kids back into their rooms until noon and tell them Santa was hung over. Laugh. When the kids beg you to stop, tell them to grow up.

2. Pretend it never happened. None of it – the weeping-clown eyes, the shouts and fights, the makeout sessions on the coats in the bedroom with the lady from down the street – never happened. At all.

3. Go out on New Year’s Eve – for three days. There are plenty of Good Humor bars in the refrigerator. And Grandma and Grandpa didn’t leave for Florida yet? Or did they?

4. Nuzzle a waitress’ boobs, even after your friend, the owner of the place, asks you to stop, until your wife and kids get up and walk home. Six miles.

5. Tell your kid he better start on the team. When he does, show up for one game.

6. Talk about how much you drank on vacation the way other people talk about vacation.

7. When your son asks what you’re going to do tonight , say, “I’m going to drink. And you’re going to stay home.”

8. When your daughter, who’s 11, calls you at a dinner party from home to say that someone has broken into the apartment building, tell her to call the cops.

9. When your best friend suggests you slow down, on the night of your birthday, wait until he’s facing the other way and kick him through the TV.

10. Show up at eighth grade graduation, drunk. Show up at high school graduation drunk. Explain that you can’t make it to college graduation.

11. Shout out your requests for Trini Lopez songs so loudly that the bandleader refers to you as “Lawrence Welk and Mrs. Robinson.”

12. When one of the kids is seventeen and gets drunk for the first of three times in her life, throwing up until she’s weak and sobbing, tell her not to worry – everyone feels this way.

13. Be beautiful and charming and funny and complex and inquisitive when you’re sober. Be diminishing, surly, humiliating and cruel when you’re drunk.

14. Die young.

Jacquelyn Mitchard is the author of the number one New York Times bestselling novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, chosen as the first book for Oprah’s Book Club and named by USA Today the second most influential novel of the past 25 years. She has written four other bestsellers and is a contributing editor for Wondertime magazine as well as the author of four novels for young adults. Her new novel, No Time to Wave Goodbye, comes out this week.