Most of us need to compartmentalize. We need a reset button. If there were no New Year's baby, we would have invented him. He offers us an emotional release mechanism without which most of us simply could not go on.

Years make a handy container for cataloging and bundling the travails of life into, storing them for future reflexion. For the less contemplative, the New Year baby gives us a mechanism for ritually forgetting about those travails, dropping them in a heap on the old side of the ball drop and just moving on.

The custom of using a baby to symbolize the New Year began in Greece around 600 B.C. It was brought to America by Germans, who had used the effigy since the fourteenth century. And it's a good symbol, as parents who have raised several children can attest. You're always hoping you're going to get the next one right.

You might think this kind of getting in touch with what must be termed your psychic inadequacy or, if you will, at least your puny insignificance up against the irresistible forces of indifferent fate, might call for at least a moment or two of solitary self-reflection, -forgiveness and -rededication.

That doesn't seem to be the case with New Years, however. It appears, judging from the throngs gathered in Times Square to mark the transition from old year to new, most people want to be in the largest crowd of strangers possible and to do it with raucously celebratory enthusiasm. These people are happy as hell. No shame, no sense of personal inadequacy or cosmic injustice. They want to get their party on in the biggest, most delirious way possible.

It's almost surprising they let old Father Time depart so easily, without tarring and feathering him first. Clearly he's the one bearing the burden of all the old year's problems and disappointments.

People have been gathering en mass at the corner of 42nd and Broadway in midtown New York to ring out the old, ring in the new since 1904, three full years before the first ball-drop. Both the gathering and the ball descent were conceived by Arthur Ochs, publisher of The New York Times, as a publicity stratagem for his new headquarters in the renamed Times Square (previously Longacre Square). And from the beginning he had no trouble attracting a willing crowd.

They've been whooping it up there ever since.

Concepcion de Leon, a staffer writing for that same paper a century later observed in an article, just last week, that the hundreds of thousands who gather to watch in person the ball descent are in turn watched by millions more eye balls in households across the country and even the world, joining up in vicarious participation. ("Epic New Year's Eve Photos: Vintage Fashion and Ecstatic Crowds." Access could be denied; the Times allows non-subscribers to view only a limited number of stories each month.)

De Leon writes, "For many Latinos, a new year is an almost magical chance for us to wipe the slate clean when the clock strikes midnight." Her sentiment would seem to be more universal than she thinks. She quotes lines from the Gloria Estefan New Year's song "Abriendo Puertas": Y vamos abriendo puertas, y vamos cerrando heridas. Translation: "And we are opening doors and we are closing wounds."