READING, Pa.- New Year\u2019s Eve in Reading doesn\u2019t look just one way. It sounds like the cheers of a hockey crowd. It feels like live symphonic music filling a theater.\u2028And it ends with fireworks lighting up the night sky.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The evening began at the Santander Arena, where the Reading Royals were back on the ice after the players\u2019 union and the league reached a deal to end the strike.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI played my whole life, and we\u2019re happy that the strike didn\u2019t hold up and that we were able to come,\u201d said fan Jimmy McKee.\u00a0<\/p>\n
From there, the celebration moved downtown to the Santander Performing Arts Center, where the Reading Symphony Orchestra filled the hall with music from the James Bond films.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI love the Reading Symphony Orchestra. They do just beautiful music. Love all the James Bond movies,\u201d said film producer Ann Goodman.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Some people planned their entire New Year\u2019s Eve around the show, even traveling hours to be there.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cTypically, we stay at home on New Year\u2019s Eve, and if we see the ball drop, we\u2019re lucky,\u201d said Laurie Bond, who drove in from Virginia. \u201cWe talked to a friend and said, \u2018What are you doing on New Year\u2019s Eve?\u2019 We said nothing, and he said, \u2018You need to go to Reading, Pennsylvania, and see the Bond show.\u2019 So we did.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
And then came the most anticipated moment of the night.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At 9:30 p.m., fireworks lit up the sky from Mount Penn, a tradition now in its 29th year, offering a shared moment for families and neighbors to close out one year and welcome the next.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe go later to our daughter\u2019s for midnight,\u201d said Sheila Walter. \u201cAnd since it\u2019s a good time frame in between, we can get there and celebrate with them also and then we tell them what we experienced here.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa.- New Year\u2019s Eve in Reading doesn\u2019t look just one way. It sounds like the cheers of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75385,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[214,128,130,129,213],"class_list":{"0":"post-75384","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-reading","8":"tag-_homepage_top_stories","9":"tag-reading-city","10":"tag-reading-city-headlines","11":"tag-reading-city-news","12":"tag-reading-area"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75384\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}