Over the next couple of days you'll be trying to ignore inane, toe-curling 'end of year messages' from local party leaders.
There'll even be the embarrassing, patronising one from the NIO – allegedly the thoughts of our proconsul, who may or may not be in the north this week. Would anyone notice if he were?
The recurring theme in the messages will be how far we've come and how much better things are now compared to the bad old days and how everyone must keep working to restore Stormont again.
It's not good enough. They've all been pouring out this sort of bilge for years now.
Oh yes, it's true that if you take the killing rate of, say, 1991-93 as a yardstick, then about 900 people are alive today who wouldn't be without the ceasefire in 1994. That's certainly something to celebrate.
Not enough though. It's just another way of saying that there has been a massive reduction and then an end to political killing by the IRA. On the other side of the fence there's been a similar reduction: killing Catholics has mainly given way to sporadic internecine murder. That process has taken 10 years.
And we congratulate ourselves, despite the absence of an equivalent political process.
It's perfectly clear that we need a new yardstick for progress. The existing one has been devised by over-fifties who lived through the Troubles and can therefore point to the vast improvement in their life-styles since 1994.
Their political search is for the Holy Grail of power-sharing which eluded them all their lives: they're still after it. So the inanity of every new year message.
More than 50 per cent of the nationalist population are under 30. Most are bored rigid by nationalist politicians' search for the Holy Grail.
Young people can't and don't compare today to how bad things were 10 years ago. They don't hanker after the political 'solution' devised by their grandparents over a quarter of a century ago: going back to the future.
They want to see change and improvement now. The paradox is that the search for the political Holy Grail is what prevents change and improvement.
We're stuck somewhere in 1999. There is this huge package just sitting there ready to be unwrapped. It's been there more or less complete since the meeting at Weston Park near Birmingham over two years ago: policing, 'on the runs', demilitarisation and all sorts of wee side deals and under-standings. Both governments added bells and whistles in their 'Joint Declaration' in spring 2003.
None of it is going to happen because it's all based on the requirement to get the Good Friday Agreement's institutions up and running again: the Holy Grail.
Not this year folks, any more than last year or the year before. Why not? Neither Dublin nor London can come to terms with the fact that unionists do not want to share power with nationalists.
The stark truth is that the majority of the unionist electorate voted DUP in November 2003 because they did not want to share power and believed that the DUP was the party which would ensure power-sharing didn't happen.
Of course people like Peter Robinson and that nice Jeffrey Donaldson pay lip service to the nationalists' Holy Grail, though they never say the words, but their terms for sharing power are so constructed that they will never have to do it whether the IRA did the Northern Bank job or not.
Remember, unionists could have had a deal with the non-threatening SDLP at any time in the 25 years between 1973 and 1998. They said NO. Why now, should they agree to a deal with Sinn Féin, especially since their electorate mandated them in 2003 NOT to do a deal with Sinn Féin?
Meanwhile, six years after the Good Friday Agreement, heli-copters still hover over nationalist districts, British soldiers and unionism's native militia patrol country roads, the Human Rights Commission is a shambles, there is no Bill of Rights, the so-called Equality Commission has no way of recording sectarian attacks but instead pretends it's operating in Wolverhampton or Southall in case somebody thinks the north's a divided society. The PSNI refers you to 'Home Office guidelines'.
What does all this signify? That the NIO's pro-union officials and unionist politicians have taken control of the peace process and are using it as a means to prevent change because no change means the north's default position operates: unionism, the opposite of equality.
