With just days to go before the world rings in a new year — and new decade — Tom Brennan, master artisan with Fiskars, a division of Waterford, is hard at work to make sure the famed crystal ball in Times Square is ready to dazzle revelers at the stroke of midnight on January 1.
"This is the only moment in time that everybody pauses for just a moment," Brennan told Cheddar on Friday while standing next to the pièce de résistance. "We don't do this other times of the year."
A team of engineers is installing 192 new Waterford crystal triangles on the ball that features this year's unique design, which Waterford is calling "Gift of Goodwill," the latest in its "Greatest Gifts" series.
The new crystals will make up just a fraction of the 2,688 triangles on the ball, which measures 12 feet across and weighs nearly six tons.
The New Year's tradition has been going on in Times Square, the crossroads of the world, since 1904, and the first ball drop happened in 1907.
Brennan stresses that it's not just him, or the team on the ground in New York that pulls off this global feat. "It is a global togetherness," he said. Waterford has craftsmen working on the project in its factories in Ireland, plus the engineers and marketers.
"It's amazing to think that this small city in the southeast of Ireland with just 47,000 people are here on top of the world. We're going to have 1.2 billion people watching us in just a few days' time, so no pressure."
Back in 1957, the late Queen Elizabeth II gifted a pair of swans to Lake Morton in Lakeland, Florida. Now there are around 50 swans from the original royal pair and each year they are rounded up and given an annual medical check-up to make sure they're all healthy.
Design and lifestyle company Apartment Therapy has brought back its annual Small/Cool NYC exhibit to showcase some of the biggest interior design trends. Maxwell Ryan, founder of Apartment Therapy, joined Cheddar News to show some of the designs the company has come up with as well as some unique choices for living spaces of any size.
It's the last day to vote for the annual CEW Beauty Awards. Ju Rhyu, co-founder and CEO of Hero Cosmetics, a finalist in the Launch of the Year category, joined Cheddar News to discuss the company's Mighty Surface Patch which has become a sensation.
California restaurants that offer boozy brunches have introduced an extra charge diners to indulge to the point of getting ill will be charged a $50 fee to cover the cleanup.
Jada Pinkett Smith and husband Will Smith have lived “completely separate lives” since 2016, she revealed in an interview with Hoda Kotb. The prominent Hollywood couple married in 1997 and have addressed separations and marital troubles, but never this specifically.
