Well I’m Scottish and we have Hogmanay....New Year’s Eve. The party usually starts around ten o’clock and at midnight we all kiss and toast each other a Happy New Year and sing Auld Lang Syne. Then we go off with a bottle of whisky and a lump of coal to “first foot” our friends and relatives. It is considered good luck for the first person to cross over the threshold on the 1st January to be a tall, dark, handsome male if possible! They should present the bottle of whisky and invite the host to have a drink of it, and give them the lump of coal - saying “Lang may your lum reek”. This means, long may you have a fire in your chimney. In each home we visit we get more food and drink until everyone is completely sozzled and then just stay put and sleep it off in whichever home we may be in by then! I should really be using the past tense as it is many years now since I lived in Scotland....but I believe it’s still celebrated in much the same way still.

Dinner on New Year's Day: Blackeyed peas for good luck, greens for money, buttermilk (usually in the form of cornbread) for good health. My Southern ex-wife brought all of this to my attention, and she still makes the best greens, though not as good as my late father-in-law. Somehow, mac and cheese always seems to make its way into the dinner as well.

As a card-carrying northeast US polak, I'd say kielbasa is good for any occasion, New Year's Day included.

Kissing on the stroke of midnight.

We ate fish too, though we celebrated New Year at a different time due to being Jews. The fish had to have the heads left on to symbolise the fact that we were at "the head of the year", which my sister hated but I loved because after eating the unfortunate fish's flesh I could dissect the head and feed the eyeballs to the cat, who loved them (or, if our mother was looking the other way, flick them at my sister, who hated them). Afterwards, we had rugelach - which is still my very favourite sort of cake.

That whole "bad spirits would hide in the clothes" thing is fairly bizarre even by the standards of religious beliefs!

All good except for the fried herring.

We never did laundry on New Year's Day because it meant you would have a year of tedious chores...

The only tradition we keep is eating collards and black eyed peas on New Year's Day to represent wealth and money for the year. Of course, we add Southern fried chicken and cornbread.

I try to stay up for the ball drop but never make it...in our area, we have a Strawberry Drop, a Pickle Drop, and a Hershey Kiss Drop...I have to watch them all the next day.

The banging of pots and pans together was always a popular tradition at midnight as well as any other sort of noise makers, probably rooted in the idea of driving away evil spirits. A whole lot of kissing people that you otherwise wouldn't want to kiss and likewise kissing people that normally wouldn't want to kiss you (slipping a bit of tongue is not good form btw). A bonfire is always nice, especially if you missed the winter solstice bonfire or the Yule log on Christmas Eve.
A personal tradition that my wife and I have kept with good friends for the past dozen years or so is that we get together for a Lobster Dinner together at either of our houses on New Years Eve, replete with a dozen oysters on the half shelf each and other delicious foods and desserts that do nothing to help us start our New Year's diets to the good. New Years Day we recover, watch a few movies together and play a board game or two, we always look forward to it as we live about a 4 hour drive away from each other and don't get to see each other as often as we would like to.

We didn't have any customs at all. My dad was from the Deep South & my mom was from Europe so you'd think they would have had something. My dad didn't even do Hoppin' John....

I grew up in a non religious family so we had no rituals. I know down here in the South they have some folks who eat black eyed peas, ham and cabbage for good luck in the new year. I tried it once when I first moved here to Texas, didn't notice anything good happening after....LOL