Good Clearance Day celebrated in Times Square by wiping the slate clean of 2024 regrets

They have some regrets.

Past Good Riddance ceremonies in Times Square have burned, shredded, buried, or otherwise destroyed regrets, frustrations, unhappy memories—all kinds of bad circumstances, some fanciful, some personal.

On Saturday, dozens of tourists and locals waited in a freezing, intermittent drizzle for this year’s gadget: scribbling on a portable board and wiping their slate clean.

“Let others have a say in who I am!!!” » was written on the list of Gabriel Cortes, 18, a student on Long Island, which he drew in blue.

Cortes, who is studying musical theater at Molloy University in Rockville Centre, was waiting to stand alongside the ceremony’s host, actor Jonathan Bennett of “Mean Girls” fame.

The two men erased the painting that Cortès had decorated with three pink hearts.

Good Clearance Day is inspired by a Latin American custom, dating back to the 1890s, in which New Year’s celebrants fill dolls with mournful memories of the past year before setting the objects on fire.

It’s almost 2025, Cortes’ good riddance was also typed by ceremony staff and broadcast off the side of a 60-by-170-foot LED screen on the Broadway side of One Times Square, where the New Year’s Eve ball An fell. since 1907 and will fall again on Tuesday. Contributions sent digitally by those in Times Square and around the world were also posted for all to see.

Upper East Side au pair Georgina Calvillo, 25, from Merida, Mexico, hopes to shake her feelings for her ex.

“He’s back in Mexico. He wanted to start a family, but I wanted to travel to see the world, and I asked him to come to New York with me, but he told me to go back to Mexico with him. Eh Well, I stayed here in New York, because New York is amazing,” she said while holding the Good Riddance painting. She is taking care of a 10-month-old child and will be staying in New York for a year. year.

Brodie Riddle, 11, of Hartselle, Alabama, was vacationing in New York with his mother, Jessica, 38, a school custodian; aunt, Misty, 35; and brother, Mason, 13.

Mason longs to stop arguing with his mother. Brodie hopes to put the bad grades behind him. He now has gentleman Cs and wants A-pluses.

“I’m really good at math and I’m bad at reading,” Brodie said shortly after appearing with Bennett.

Anna Daratany, 57, of Coney Island, a retired retail employee who once worked at Macy’s, aims to get rid of belly fat and combat menopause and hormonal issues.

“I’ll be about 7 pounds lighter,” she said, adding, “The ladies understand.”

Nearby was Brenda Pallessi, 63, of Parsippany, New Jersey, a school nurse. What she hopes will be better in 2025: “Disrespectful people”, “Politics”, “Pain”, “Indifferent friends, family and co-workers”.

“I want people to be kinder,” she says. “The world seems so ungrateful these days, and it’s sad.” (She declined to name names.)

Tom Harris, president of the Times Square Alliance, which represents about 2,600 businesses in the area and which organized the ceremony, had a similar aspiration: “What I would like to say good riddance to is political strife. We have had enough political conflicts in recent years. It’s time to move forward and truly be the United States of America. »

Jean Rios, 42, was in town from Lima, Peru, and wiped his slate clean of “debts,” “some problems” and “wars.”

He hopes 2025 will be a better year. “You have to be positive,” he said.

Times Square’s Good Riddance Day is in its 18th year. Its record of success is mixed.

At the 2019 ceremony, wishes included a year better than 2019.

A few months after this ceremony, the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world.