Hung Up December 2022 Playlist

🥂🎩🪩😵‍💫🍾

Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut. Photo: Screenshot.

I feel how I feel about winter — it sucks — but December is the last gasp before what is the chilly Monday morning of a new year: January. Christmas and religious holidays split custody of December with the most loaded with expectation night of the year, New Year's Eve.

I have never had a New Year’s Eve I was happy with. Inevitably, I’m one place wishing I was another. There’s a restlessness to the night for me, an almost panicked need to make it special, or make it worth it, or to do something that feels encapsulating or all-encompassing. But it’s always just another night. One pandemic night I watched Phantom Thread, timed perfectly so that the movie’s New Years Eve scene would coincide with the beginning of the new year, but I kept falling asleep. Another New Years Eve I spent watching the ball drop with Auntie and Uncle, both in their 80s, both of them giggling because they couldn’t believe I was old enough to drink…