Sometimes the best way to bid our bad memories goodbye is to destroy them — literally.
On Dec. 28, New Yorkers can obliterate any object that represents the unhealthy habits, the cheating exes, terrible jobs, debilitating illnesses, and disturbing current events that plagued them in 2015.
The ninth annual "Good Riddance Day," hosted by the Times Square Alliance from noon to 1 p.m. the Monday before New Year's, will welcome the public to shred papers and smash items that call to mind "unpleasant, embarrassing and downright forgettable memories" from the past year.
The event that attracts hundreds of New Yorkers and visitors to the city takes its inspiration from an Ecuadorian tradition in which the effigies of politicians, pop culture stars and other icons of the old year are torched in the streets to cleanse all things bad before the new year begins.
”The deeper emotional part of [celebrating New Year's] is this sense of putting the past behind us, sometimes aggressively so through something like 'Good Riddance Day,' and having a sense of a new beginning and a new start," Times Square Alliance president Tim Tompkins said of the tradition his organization launched with an office paper shredder.
That first year, "the sound effects were great, because you could really hear it gurgle on the stuff that was getting fed into it," Tompkins recalled. "But yeah, we had a bunch of jams."
The alliance soon recruited Shred-It, a document destruction services company, to equip the event with a giant industrial-strength shredder. The organization will also provide a sledgehammer and other tools to pulverize unwanted three-dimensional objects.
At "Good Riddance Day," attendeees can destroy everything from pay stubs to CT scans to Trump bobbleheads — but not too many things at once.
Event organizers had to turn away a man who once brought an entire suitcase of documents, Tompkins recalled.
"We were like, 'Sir, you can’t dominate our shredder all day. You have to come back,'" he said. "The machine could take it, but the rest of the people on line weren’t exactly having it."
This year, Tompkins predicts participants may bring items "relate[d] to good riddance to corrupt politicians, because we’ve had a few of those in New York lately, or, obviously, good riddance to violence and terror."
For those who want to curse Sheldon Silver's name, but can't make it to Times Square that Monday, there's always a write-in option.
