New Year's

The Times Square ball has come down every New Year's Eve since 1907, except for two wartime years when the crowd stood in silence and listened to church bells instead. The song everybody half-knows at midnight is a poem Robert Burns wrote down in 1788, Raleigh lowers a 900-pound acorn by crane, and the black-eyed peas and collards on Southern tables on January 1 are supposed to pay out in coins and dollar bills. This hub has eight games on the countdown, the songs, the lucky food, the bowl games and the ways the rest of the world rings it in.