It’s nearly New Years, when thoughts turn to bubbly beverages – and, if you’re me, whether you’ll actually be able stay up until midnight without falling asleep on the sofa. I’m not frequently asked to make toasts, but I’ve always been fond of Here’s to you and here’s to me, friends may we always be! But, if by chance we disagree… Fuck ya! Here’s to me!
So what’s your go-to toast, or the toast you’d like to give this year, for yourself, your family, or your future? I’ll pick a comment at random, and the winner will receive a set of four Riedel champagne glasses. I wanted to send champagne but holy crap, you wouldn’t believe the insanity to send liquor across state lines in the US.
Yes I would believe the crap to send it- I decided it was cheaper to buy daughter a new bottle of Crown than sending one of hers.
Our usual toast is zzzzzzz. This year we will spend the night having dinner at our favorite chinese resturant and then making sure everything is ready for us to fly out the next day to CA. So my toast would be to my daughter and may the wind always be at her back and the angels watching over her so far away from me.
I won’t take the responsibility for this toast since it came from a Harlequin Presents Greek Tycoon book way back in the day… and has stayed with me…. for reasons known only to a crazy-mad editor somewhere.
To love is nothing
To be loved is something
To love and be loved is everything
yup, for better or worse those Greek Tycoons started an awful lot of readers down the romancelandia path.
I’m a little bit Irish and the one that always comes to mind is my dad’s usual, May you live as long as you want and never want as long as you live.
Ev, yours is one that gets bandied about family gatherings, too, and JoanneL (of the Joanne twins, I presume? *chuckle*, I’ve never heard the Greek Tycoon’s toast, but duuude! *writes it down* It’s awesome!
My toast would be :
That this new year may be happy, healthy and please, let us make some money !!!!
LOL I don’t know what it says about me as a reader but remembering that toast and not the name of the book or author or the year… that must be wrong in so many ways. I should try to track her name down and send her some glasses for toasting words that last.
The Irish seem to have a toast for every occasion and always an occasion for a toast *g*
also an Irish toast: “May you be in heaven a full half hour before the devil knows your dead.” I rather like that one. and then there is the entire song of Auld Lang Syne. Does anyone else cry at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life when they sing that?
spamword: well87. Maybe you be hearty and well for the next 87 years.
“Screw you, 2008! We survived anyway!!!”
Its been a rough one, but we’ve survived it and will continue to do so.
HeeHee. Made me think of: I’ve a wee bit of Irish in me too, from time to time…. but enough about my husband.
(Come on! Who doesn’t like a New Years dick joke?)
My old stand-by toast:
The good Lord gives us our relatives. Thank God we can choose our friends.
Oh my cheer will definitely be a cheer for my kid sister who continually gives me heart papitations over deadlines and projects at school where I’m often rushing around to buy her something she needs or get her somewhere in time, or nagging her to do homework: “Here’s to your graduating – you got a major in art, I got a minor in stress and hairpulling!”
I don’t have a toast, but the glasses would be a lot more classy than the pink ones I got from Harlequin in the 80s.
I don’t really have a go to toast but if I did it would go something like this: I didn’t kill anyone,(spcecificly the co-worker from hell) I’m not in jail, now drink up and then get the hell out.
My favorite toast (which I believe is from J. Bryan’s “Hodgepodge: A Commonplace Book,” a veritable tome of interesting trivia and random bits and pieces) is also Irish.
“To Your Coffin: May it have handles of solid silver, be carried by six true friends, and be hewn from the wood of a hundred-year-old tree, which I shall plant tomorrow”
(someday, I’m going to go and get alcohol worthy of making that toast)
JD
Well, a perfect toast for my family would be, “May you always get enough wine, enough song, and enough fruit, cause constipation sucks,” but as whacko as my house would be, it would probably sound something like this: “May you always get enough wine, enough song, and JESUS would somebody get the fucking champagne away from the five year old? He’s nuts enough as it is!” This could be why we don’t really keep alcohol in the house.
Toasting only wastes time before consuming delicious champagne (or whatever I may be drinking).
My favorite toast is:
“Tonight, to hell with everyone else.
Tonight, we’ll drink hard, we’ll drink to ourselves!”
We’re alive, we’re beautiful, and we’re loved, and I’ll drink to that!
Since my dad died this fall, I’ll be toasting with his crusty old favorite:
“Here’s mud in yer eye!”
And yes, I’ll be washing that mud out with tears. And then toasting with his second favorite toast:
“And here’s one for the other eye!”
Here’s to you, Dad.
“Here’s to us! May we put 2008 behind us like a hooker puts the nightmares of frat rush behind them!”
At least once a year, we all have to do “Here’s to crime!” for my cousin, and I’m rather partial to this one, not sure where I first heard it:
“Round the tonsils,
Round the gums;
Fuck you, stomach,
Here it comes!”
large36: may you all have a large glass of ‘36.
The DH is a runaway Scot and he gets all thing at New Years. I get many a heartfelt kiss and sloppy glass-clinking and yells of *slange*. (I know, that’s the wrong spelling, but I’ll be buggered if I’ll look it up).
Don’t put me in the draw as the glasses that clink in our world contain whiskey not champagne.
Today is my 40th birthday (Yea, me!) so I have been doing an awful lot of thinking about the next year.
I think my toast would be:
May we all try new things and be content with the things we have.
My favorite is a variant of SB Sarah’s:
Here’s to the men that we love.
Here’s to the man that love us.
If the men that we love aren’t the men that love us,
Fuck all the men, here’s to us!
I always go with the stand by my mom would use when she was still with us:
Here’s to health, wealth and happiness, may you have them all and want for nothing.
Thanks for a great year. You ladies always make me laugh.
I like the toast that seems to cover everything.
Health, wealth, love, and time to enjoy them all.
Also on the theme of old Irish blessings we usually use May the best of your past be the worst of your future.
Although for a romantic turn I still love William Butler Yeats’ A Drinking Song
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and sigh.
Then again some people just make you want to drink without the sighing.
I am also a big fan of “May the saddest day of your future be no worse than the happiest day of your past,” which is another variation of Becky Ann’s Irish blessing. But I think most often the toast offered around my house is a simple “Salute” or “Salud.”
Mine’s from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series (which, if you haven’t read, you should – it’s groundbreaking and fantastically good, especially if you read it in order):
“To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due.”
Of course, when push comes to shove, I can never remember the whole thing, and I just make something up (so, less classy and more along the lines of “Here’s to our future, here’s to our past, if you don’t like us, you can kiss my ass.”)
Spamword: alone88 – dude, I was 13 in ‘88, of course I was alone for New Year’s Eve! Y’Know, aside from my parents.
Whenever I toast it’s Prost!
A toast to love, in which we glimpse a bit of the divine
May the bird of paradise fly up your nose!
(not very original, I know…)
We can’t be in Scotland for Hogmanay this year, which is sad, sad, sad. But the traditional toast in our little corner of whiskey country goes, “Here’s to them that’s like us. Damn few, and most of ‘em deed.” (that’s dead, of course)
One of my resolutions for 2008 was to drink more champagne. I have been moderately successful in keeping that one.
In 2009 I will be 50. That’s the new 30, right?
A toast to your coffin.
May it be made of 100 year old oak.
And may we plant the tree together, tomorrow.
May misfortune follow you the rest of your life,
but never catch up.
There are good ships, and there are wood ships,
The ships that sail the sea.
But the best ships, are friendships,
And may they always be.
Old wood to burn,
Old books to read,
Old wine to drink,
Old friends to trust.
Here’s to us,
And those like us.
Damn few and they’re probably dead.
Cheers!
These are a few good ones.
Deidre
Sarah, you don’t have to enter me in the drawing (more champagne flutes than I can shake a…well, champagne flute at), but my current fave toast is “God save me from my friends—I can protect myself from my enemies.”
Happy and Prosperous 2009 to all the Bitches.