I know I am going to be sitting on my couch on New Year's Eve, glued to the TV screen watching the rest of the world having fun.

At the stroke of midnight, I know I will also be sipping a mug of hot pre-biotical herbal tea (good for cholesterol and for those who over-indulge) and I will step outside into the balcony in the biting cold to hear the deep, muffled thunder of fireworks from the Burj Al Arab.

I will also be checking on the website timeanddate.com to see which place on the globe will celebrate the New Year first (I believe it will be Kiritimati, Christmas Islands in the Indian Ocean), and I will follow the clock down to Tokyo, Beijing and Jakarta, and so on.

Then I will switch off the lights and go to sleep. You may ask, how do I know what I will be doing in the future? It's because I have been ringing in the New Year the very same way for years, except for one year when I had a mug of hot chocolate instead of tea, just for variety.

The reason why I spend New Year's at home instead of going silly on the streets, yelling at people and startling those returning home late after work, is because my wife, son and I are on different internal clocks.

Losing sleep

The one time we had dinner at a Chinese restaurant (for some reason we were under the impression that eating Chinese on New Year's was auspicious) and just after the dim sums my son nearly slipped from his chair half asleep and my wife had a continuous bout of yawning despite the noise and hubbub around us.

We barely made it home that night without me having to drag everyone over the landing stairs.

I am not sure how the tradition of honking car horns or paper blowers and throwing dance parties and kissing everyone came about, but it sure got me stressed out many years, thinking I was not having any fun on New Year's Eve if I was not doing crazy moves on the dance floor as the floor moved about.

But over the years my wife and I have never got on to the dance floor on the 31st of December, but we have done exciting things like burning chicken tikka on a barbecue in Safa Park.

[The fire went out of control when I flicked the tikkas away from the fire and the burning bits of chicken landed on the scraps of paper we had brought along to stoke the fire.

My son then had to empty the whole jumbo bottle of his favourite soft drink on our picnic stuff to bring the fire under control].

Cleaning up the mess made us all very hungry so we went to a Pakistani eatery nearby and ordered chicken tikka and biryani but somehow it was not the same as burning your own food.

The first time we landed in Canada we were invited to a New Year's party thrown by a group of new Indian immigrants where everyone danced to A.R. Rahman's song Chaiya, Chaiya, a Sufi folk song performed in a Bollywood movie on top of a train.

The one time I accepted an invite to a New Year's party in a Gulf state, my wife decided to stay at home and I got terribly lost since there were no street signs and following directions was like following clues in a treasure map. "After 15 metres you will pass a green municipal trash bin…."

After an hour of going round various trash bins, I finally decided to go back home. "Is it New Year already?" asked my wife sleepily from her bed. "No," I said, "I am still lost in the old one."