Happy New Year: The One Without The Fireworks Meant the Most
- Jean-Paul Courville
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
By Jean-Paul Courville
As 2025 turns into 2026, let me share a personal story that comes from a moment in time that landed during a pivotal season of my life, 2014—when everything was changing, yet nothing felt rushed.
As you read this, picture yourself near a fire, your favorite drink in hand. The flames crackle. The world quiets. You listen as the story unfolds—and when it ends, it’s your turn to share your own best New Year’s memory.
Do you love celebrating New Year’s?
Do you stay up for the countdown?
Do you set resolutions and tell yourself; this is the year things change?
I’ve never been the person who needs to stay up until midnight to watch the clock turn. I don’t need the countdown, the noise, or the theatrics to tell me that time has moved forward. And I’ve never fully bought into New Year’s resolutions either—not because I don’t believe in change, but because I’ve seen how often those resolutions burn hot and fast, then quietly fade.
I get the excitement. I understand the psychology behind it. People want a clean slate, a symbolic reset. But I’ve watched that cycle repeat itself too many times: the declarations, the enthusiasm, the social media posts—and then, a month or six weeks later, nothing has changed. Same habits. Same routines. Same explanations. Rarely an honest admission that this isn’t the first time it’s happened.
For me, goals aren’t seasonal. Fitness is year-round. Financial discipline is year-round. When I decide to make a bold or meaningful change, I don’t wait for January 1st. I act when it’s time—October, March, whenever life makes it clear that movement is required. That mindset has served me well.
That said, I’m not a New Year’s scrooge. Not even close. There’s something undeniably electric about the space between Christmas and the start of a new year. You feel it in the air. You feel it in people. I love the idea of New Year’s. What I’ve grown less fond of is the spectacle that often surrounds it.
I’ve experienced New Year’s in some incredible places. In Dubai, extravagance isn’t just encouraged—it’s expected. The fireworks, the lights, the sheer scale of it all are breathtaking.
But once the smoke clears and the lights go out, you’re left standing in massive crowds, fighting traffic, waiting hours just to get back to your car or hotel. That post-celebration reality has a way of draining the magic pretty quickly.
New Orleans is much the same for me. I grew up in southeastern Louisiana and experienced New Year’s there both as a teenager and later as an adult. The allure never really changes. It’s exciting, memorable, and bombastic in all the ways New Orleans does best. But it also falls into the same pattern. Once the fireworks end, the noise doesn’t stop.
The crowds linger. Fatigue sets in long after the celebration is supposed to be over. Even on the years when I want something low-key, the city doesn’t really give you that option. Like so many large New Year’s celebrations, the buildup is electric—but the aftermath has a way of dulling what just felt unforgettable.
I’ve spent New Year’s in places that were undeniably beautiful. At Big Bear Lake in California, fireworks were launched from barges on the water—reflections rippling across the lake, snow in the air, the whole scene feeling restrained and intentional. And yet, even there, the aftermath lingered: traffic snarled around the mountain, crowds bottlenecked on narrow roads, and the familiar sense that the buildup had outweighed the payoff.
I’ve felt the same standing barefoot on the beach in Destin, Florida, watching fireworks light up the Gulf, reflections stretching across the water. Incredible views. Memorable moments. The kind of spectacle people travel great distances to see.
What I eventually realized wasn’t that New Year’s disappointed me—it was how manufactured we’ve made it. How much effort goes into producing a moment instead of experiencing one.
New Years—2020 turning into 2021, in the middle of COVID. Where were you? We all remember that clown show. I was living in the United Arab Emirates, in a relationship, when we decided to leave the noise behind and drive until it disappeared. We found an isolated stretch of coastline on a narrow peninsula between Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, set up camp, cooked our own food, and watched dolphins surface at sunset just offshore as they ate shrimp straight off the water, it was quiet, and we welcomed the New Year without a crowd, without a countdown, without spectacle.
That night didn’t happen by accident. It happened because of what I’d learned years earlier in the mountains of Oman—that if you strip New Year’s down to its essentials, you don’t lose anything that matters. You gain it.
And then there was New Year’s of 1998 turning into 1999.
I was a platoon sergeant stationed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and two young Marines were on an observation post that overlooked the perimeter. Midnight rolled around. They were bored. Too bored. So they decided to celebrate by lighting off different-colored pop-up flares they had on post.
Those flares, of course, signaled a potential breach. Within minutes, a quick reaction force spun up. An entire squad—including me—moved to support and defend what we believed might be a hostile incursion into a U.S. naval facility. Radios were hot. Weapons were up. Adrenaline was doing what adrenaline does.
When we arrived, we didn’t find an invading force. We found two very high Marines.
Earlier that day, a storm had overturned a Jamaican vessel offshore, and professionally wrapped packages of marijuana had floated in with the tide. They’d found it. Smoked it. And when midnight hit—New Year’s Eve, after all—they decided to celebrate because, in their minds, it seemed like a good idea at the time. It wasn’t.
You truly can’t make it up.
The most enjoyable New Years for me was the simplest—and the most adventurous.
I retired from the U.S. Marine Corps in 2013 after 22 years of service and moved to the United Arab Emirates in early 2014 to work as a civilian contractor. That year was about transition—finding my footing outside the uniform, learning a new rhythm, and building friendships with people from all over the world. Many of those friendships were formed hiking and camping in the northern Emirates and across the border in Oman.
As 2014 turned into 2015, a group of us loaded our vehicles with camping gear and drove deep into the mountains of Oman—moving through Jebel Shams, Jebel Akhdar, and countless small villages scattered throughout the region. We spent days hiking, exploring old stone settlements, and moving at a pace that had nothing to do with schedules or signals.
(See: “Discovering Oman” https://www.jpcadventures.com/post/discovering-oman)
When I returned to the United Arab Emirates, friends were eager to share their New Year’s stories—Dubai breaking records again, fireworks, packed crowds, parties stretching into the early morning. I listened, smiled, and nodded. But I didn’t feel it. Not because their experiences weren’t incredible—they were—but because what I had just lived didn’t translate well outside the people who lived it with me.
It reminded me of how musicians talk about the difference between technical skill and soul. You can play every note perfectly and still miss the feeling. Carlos Santana is gifted, talented, and technically brilliant.
But, with Stevie Ray Vaughan you felt it.
I shared the stories when I got back—through words, through photos—but it landed flat, I wanted them to feel it.
Not because people didn’t care, but because some experiences don’t carry the same weight once they leave the moment they were born in.
That’s a lesson I’ve relearned more than once: you want others to feel what you felt, but no matter how gifted a storyteller you are, some things resist translation. That’s why it matters to share moments fully when you’re in them—because the real payoff comes later. Eleven years on, I can still reach out to the people who were there, and within minutes we’re back in it.
The fire. The mountains. The conversations. The feeling. Some stories don’t fade.
They just wait for the right people to hear them again.
It wasn’t just New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. It was days of adventure—hiking to summits, exploring old stone villages tucked into the mountains, walking the Balcony Trail along what many call the Grand Canyon of the Middle East. We stopped for tea with local villagers who invited us in, shared food, and welcomed us without expectation.
As with most good adventures, things didn’t go exactly as planned. Before reaching one campsite, we stopped to explore a series of waterholes tucked into a wadi. One friend jumped down onto what looked like a solid rock. It wasn’t. The rock shifted, and he shattered his ankle.
What followed were hours of uncertainty—multiple hospitals, late-night drives, insurance questions, pain, and a long wait until he was finally treated sometime after 2 a.m. I stayed with him the entire time. By the time I reached the campsite around 3:30 in the morning, everyone else was asleep, tents pitched, the fire long gone.
The next day, while the rest of us hiked to the summit, he stayed behind—lying near a vehicle, journaling, resting, refusing to let his injury derail the group’s experience. Quiet resilience at its finest.
That night—New Year’s Eve—we gathered around a campfire. Christmas had just passed, so there were Santa hats and strings of lights.
Food cooked over an open flame. Stories flowed more freely. Above us, the moon and stars lit the highest point in Oman.
In the distance, tiny lights stretched across the region—to the Straits of
Hormuz, toward Iran. No countdown. No screens. No fireworks. Just people. Around that fire were people from Lebanon, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Australia, and more. Each of us shared what New Year’s meant growing up—family traditions, cultural differences, memories both joyful and complicated. Despite our differences, the common thread was unmistakable: reflection, hope, and the quiet desire to do better moving forward.
That night didn’t feel forced. It didn’t need theatrics. It didn’t need a resolution announced or written down. It was grounded, communal, and deeply human.
That New Year—December 31st, 2014, into January 1st, 2015—has aged well for me. So well, in fact, that I find myself telling that story nearly every year when New Year’s comes around. It surfaces naturally in conversation, often unprompted, because it marked a time in my life when connection mattered more than spectacle. I’ve been fortunate to witness countless other celebrations since then—iconic skylines, breathtaking views, fireworks that people travel across the world to see.
It reminded me of something simple and true: real change doesn’t need a countdown, and meaning doesn’t need an audience. Sometimes the most powerful way to step into a new year is to strip everything back—to shared effort, honest conversation, curiosity, adventure, and a fire under the stars.
As this year turns and another begins, that’s still the New Year I measure the rest against.
And it’s the one I’ll take—every time.
Happy New Year
JPC