Time again for toasts: indulge, enliven, knock ‘em dead. Puns, pranks, raillery and repartee, perky and playful thoughts to ring out the old and ring in a joyous 2005 New Year.

Toasts for 2006

The ancient Greeks had a nasty habit of poisoning wine to dispatch enemies, competitors and spouses who stayed around too long. To demonstrate that a pitcher was poison-free, a thoughtful host would pour the wine and raise his own glass (or goblet, or whatever vessels they happened to be using) and drink, leading the way for his guests to follow. So the toast was born. Or so a good story was invented.

Rome admired everything in Greek culture, especially poisoning, and so the toasting tradition continued. A few historians claim that the Romans gave us the term because they sometimes dropped a piece of charred bread into their wine. This has some rational basis in that charcoal can reduce acidity, but ancient tastes were so considerably different from our own that I find it hard to make such a direct connection.

The most convincing evidence is the Latin word, tostus, which means roasted. In any case, something was cooking, or burning, and the concept has been with us ever since. We don’t know what happened to toasting in the Dark Ages, when the winemaking tradition was mostly practiced by monks (and wine was sometimes used as currency). Did they have somber, religious toasts, or was there some frisky monkish humor in the monastery? Did they say things like this?

Round the table, let it roll.
The divine says that wine
Cheers the body and the soul.

I love toasts, and here is my annual roundup, some for the New Year, and some for any time you want add a dollop of wit, humor or folk wisdom to the gathering. I include traditional toasts as well as short pieces of light verse, which, to my mind, serve very well as convivial commendations when we raise our glasses.

If you know it’s going to be an evening of banter and toasts, make yourself a crib sheet with a few good ones. Spontaneity is not everything. Your friends won’t mind you using notes if what you have to say is entertaining and clever.

From Ogden Nash, an American poet and master of language, who gave us such mirthful interpretations of life in his light verse:

The panther is like a leopard,
Except it hasn’t been peppered.
Should you behold a panther crouch,
Prepare to say ouch.
Better yet, if called by a panther,
Don’t anther.

I recently found that one of my enduring heroes, Benjamin Franklin, wrote a toast for the New Year:

Be at war with your voices; at peace with your neighbors, and let every New Year find you a better man.

Comments on wine always make good toasts. Here is one from Franklin, who incidentally was the toast of Paris: “Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance.”

A few other thoughts on wine:

Wine is bottled poetry. --Robert Louis Stevenson

Good wine ruins the purse; bad wine ruins the stomach. --Spanish saying

I like best the wine drunk at the cost of others. –Diogenes

Up to the age of forty eating is beneficial. After forty, drinking. --The Talmud

(Writers on wine have taken liberties with this quote over the years. My research shows that it does not necessarily refer to drinking wine. It could be water. But I include it anyway.)

Most of us have heard these beautiful, bittersweet, poignant and playful lines by Edna St. Vincent Millay, but few know that the title of this poem is First Fig. When originally published in 1921 it was considered madcap and Byronesque.

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

It gives a lovely light.

And here are some short, traditional and worthwhile sentiments for the New Year:

May the New Year help to make us old.

May you live as long as you want and never want as long as you live.

May you get all your wishes but one, so that you always have something to strive for.

May your house always be too small to hold all of your friends.

Stir the eggnog, lift the toddy, Happy New Year, everybody. --Phyllis McGinley.

My favorite of all, the irreplaceable toast I repeat every year in this column and wherever I happen to be on New Year’s Eve, consists of these three lines from a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson:

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring happy bells across the snow;
The year is going, let him go.