Where To Celebrate New Year’s Eve 2023 In The Stamford Area

STAMFORD, CT — As 2023 comes to a close, residents are looking for ways to celebrate and ring in the new year.

There are several options in the Stamford area, from going out to a local restaurant to catching a comedy show downtown.

Here is a look at some events happening in and around Stamford on New Year's Eve:

• Stamford Comedy Club Presents: New Year's Eve Laughs: Start off your New Year's Eve 2024 with a fun-filled night of laughs, delicious Italian food and hand-crafted drinks in downtown Stamford.
• New Year's Eve at The Wheel, Stamford: The New Year's Eve menu is $125 per person.
• New Year's Eve at Prime: An American Kitchen & Bar, Stamford: Enjoy a $175 four-course prix fixe dinner menu with all your favorite Prime seafood, sushi, and USDA Prime steak.
• Noon Year's Eve Party at Ferguson Library, Stamford (3-8 years old, begins 10:30 a.m.): Bring your children to the library to celebrate 2024 (at a reasonable hour).
• New Year's Eve gala at L'Escale, Greenwich: The gala menu $255 per person and
  includes live music, dancing and a champagne toast at midnight.

In the United States, one of the most popular New Year’s Eve traditions is the dropping of the giant ball in New York City’s Times Square. Other U.S. cities have adopted iterations of the ball drop — the Chick Drop in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and the giant Potato Drop in Boise, Idaho, for example.

The end of one year and beginning of another is often celebrated with the singing of “Auld Lang Syne,” a Scottish folk song whose title roughly translates to “days gone by,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica and History.com.

The history of New Year’s resolutions dates back 8,000 years to ancient Babylonians, who would make promises to return borrowed objects and pay outstanding debts at the beginning of the new year, in mid-March when they planted their crops.

According to legend, if they kept their word, pagan gods would grant them favor in the coming year. If they broke the promise, they would fall out of God’s favor, according to a history of New Year’s resolutions compiled by North Hampton Community College New Center in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Many secular New Year’s resolutions focus on imagining new, improved versions of ourselves.

The failure rate of New Year’s resolutions is about 80 percent, according to U.S. News & World Report. There are myriad reasons, but a big one is they’re made out of remorse — for gaining weight, for example — and aren’t accompanied by a shift in attitude and a plan to meet the stress and discomfort of changing a habit or condition.