Nude Years Eve at Haulover- A Naturist Article

Here in the Palm Beaches there were many options for a special New Year’s Eve celebration. There was live music at  Sunsport Gardens, fireworks on Clematis Street, and a canoe outing at Grassy Waters Nature Preserve.

For us, there was only one way to ring in 2010; Nude Year’s Eve at Haulover Beach.    This was to be three days of revelry on the beach, and one glorious night where we were allowed to sleep on the beach.

The rare December 31st blue moon, and the start of the new decade, filled NYE 2010 with excitement even beyond the usual annual festivities. Being able to celebrate it in the nude and on the beach was like a dream come true for my Connecticut self.

It’s a dream that looked in a lot of ways like an old Elvis movie, except nude. Or maybe a beach movie ten years newer than that, with love beads and incense. In those movies we never see the grittiness of the sand, nor the dampness of the early morning.

Fact is, camping on the beach is a lot harder than it looks. But the opportunity to see the full moon rising over the water, and then, the next morning, the sun following its path, was worth every grain of sand in unmentionable places.

The entire event was produced by BEACHES Foundation and South Florida Free Beaches. The Beach Ambassadors did an amazing job organizing, answering questions, and making all five hundred of us comfortable. Shirley Mason, the “Mother of Haulover Beach,” did an outstanding job presiding over every aspect of planning and running this major event, and being a gracious hostess at the New Year’s Eve party.

The party itself was really terrific. A fully catered seafood dinner was followed by a drum circle and DJ dancing until the wee hours. I was so proud of Sunsport when, right after the midnight countdown, we four Sunsport residents were the only people to run into the surf for a midnight moonlight swim. Well, swim may be overstating it a bit. But we did surrender ourselves to the power of the ocean at night, and it was beautiful.  Again, something of the movies that doesn’t usually happen in a world where beaches close at sunset.

The next morning we took a swim at dawn and enjoyed a catered breakfast. By noon, the record-cold temperatures were descending on Florida. Though the party was to continue on the beach for two more days, we took our memories of a fabulous New Year’s Eve and opted to finish our celebration back at Sunsport, in our cozy heated trailer.

The online travel website Tripadvisor.com listed Nude Year’s Eve at Haulover Beach as the Most Extreme New Year’s Eve Party in all of the United States and Europe. More extreme than skydiving at midnight in Zephyrhills, or wearing orange hats at the Hague.

My first reaction when I read the Tripadvisor list was to feel, for once in my life, like part of the elite ubercool.   Woo-hoo, I am extreme! Not bad for forty-seven years old.

Next, it occurred to me that, since a bunch of middle aged folks camping on the beach isn’t extreme at all, it must be the nudity that earned us that grand title. So clearly Tripadvisor had no idea that 2010 was being celebrated in the buff at literally hundreds, maybe thousands, of nudist parks and resorts throughout the world.

In the end, my final reaction to the Tripadvisor list was sadness. I was sad that social nudity, in 2010, is still considered “extreme.” 

Events like Nude Year’s Eve, the Sunsport Gardens Drum Circle, The Midwinter Naturist Festival and others that draw positive public attention to nudist culture may eventually help take our society’s perception of social nudism from “extreme” to “normal.” For now, Nude Year’s Eve at Haulover Beach was an EXTREMEly good time, and a great start to a new nude year.