New Year’s Day is an underrated holiday without a solid identity. Christmas has presents, Thanksgiving has food and football, Easter has brunch and church, and 4th of July has fireworks and hot-dog eating contests. But what does New Year’s Day have?

I do not remember doing anything as a kid for New Year’s Day. No family event. No meal. Sure there are hangovers and college football. Some people, if they are lucky enough to live near a Greek diner (in the north) or a House of Pies (like me in Texas), go out for a big breakfast. And the luckiest of all are those who live in Southern California, who have the opportunity to make the Rose Bowl parade a tradition. But there is not much else to New Year’s Day.

However, it is a great holiday. It is the only holiday that is really independent of religion and country. We are all on the same clock (or at least those in your time zone are). We can all celebrate the fact that life should, and sometimes does, get better as you move forward. The drinking and celebrating are nice in the evening, but the next day should have more tradition than recovery and Tylenol.

As it turns out, thanks to the infinite wisdom of television executives, New Year’s Day does have an identity and tradition that are quickly emerging, and they are as the best day for television of the year. For years it was a great day to watch college football. And it still is. Though college football has diluted its pool of bowl games, and has spread the meaningful games across the first week of January, there is still the Gator Bowl, the Rose Bowl, and other major bowl games on Jan 1. As I mentioned before there is the tournament of Roses Parade. There used to be a Cotton Bowl parade, and even an Orange Bowl parade, but I don’t know if those are still going. The newest sports tradition on New Year’s Day is the NHL’s Winter Classic. In the last 5 years the NHL has pitted two of it’s best teams against each other in an outdoor hockey game. Brilliant idea for the fourth-place (in major American sports) NHL.

Where television really stepped up was the programming of classic shows in a 24 hour-plus marathon format. I think it started with WPIX in New York showing 24-hour marathons of the Twilight Zone. This was a real tradition for me growing up, and it holds today. WPIX used to promote the show by saying the marathon would “continue and continue and continue…” Then they played Ol’ Lang Syne, but all distorted and faulty, as to be ominously menacing. Now it is on the Sci-Fi channel, and the marathon stretches from Dec31 well into Jan2.  I think WPIX in New York does the Honeymooners now. Brilliant.

Recently AMC has done the Stooges, which has just made more work for my poor TV controller. And the stooges are perfect for New Years. They remind you of what you probably looked like last night, and their humor is perfect for a day of hazy cognition. Sometimes people forget what geniuses they were. Last night in one episode, they were captured, the commander asked them, “Choose your manner of death.” The boys huddled around, argued with and whispered to each other in a circle, then emerged from the huddle with an answer. Moe said, “We’ve made a decision. We’d like to die from old age.” Genius.

With the success of the Twilight Zone marathons, the other cable networks took notice. Today you can find marathons on Lifetime, FX, Spike, Nickelodeon, History Channel, etc, to compete for the attention of all the Jan 1 couch potatoes.  On the other popular stations and premium channels they show classic movies all day long. At one point last night I was between a movie on Comedy Central, Stooges, TW-Zone, Fiesta Bowl, and Winter Classic. It was maddening. But it was the one time of the year that there was no guilt in wasting that much time on television. After all, you have 364 days to get going. Television is perfect for New Year’s Day, and in my house is THE tradition.

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