Boston comic Lamont Price, who is headlining two New Year’s Eve shows at Cinema Salem, is a self-professed “holiday nerd.” His season of celebration starts around Aug. 1 when he begins anticipating Halloween, runs through Thanksgiving and Christmas, and begins winding down as Jan. 1 approaches. Even then, it’s not completely over. “I hold on to it,” he says. “It’s never truly over until two weeks into January in my mind.”
It has been this way for Price since he was a kid, and he still draws a lot of joy from the things he loved then. “I just never grew out of it,” he says. “A lot of my personality is nostalgia driven, is based on stuff that I liked as a kid. Certain people go, ‘I’m an adult now. I shouldn’t like certain things anymore.’ I never did that. I never said to myself, ‘Well, I’m 25, it’s time for me to put the cartoons down.’ Like, no, what are you, crazy? Put the cartoons down? I’ve never been the kind of person to subscribe to society’s idea of what you should be at a certain age.”
The Hallmark Channel helps. There is no time of year Price won’t watch a Hallmark Christmas movie, and if you follow him on Instagram, you can see him commenting on different scenes, “Mystery Science Theater”-style. Price came to terms with his love for these movies in 2012 when he first saw the Henry Winkler vehicle “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”
“I am enamored with movies like this set in a town that I would never be allowed in,” he says. “Some of the stuff is so goofy.”
Price recognizes that New Year’s Eve is about the hope and promise of the rebirth, the idea that anything could happen. But that feeling wears off, and then it’s just cold. And cold is no fun without Christmas carols. “I get excited in the spring,” he says. “Because there’s that sort of post-Christmas apocalypse. Now it’s winter. And it’s going to be wintertime until March.”
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Comedy headliner Lamont Price will let the most wonderful time of the year linger a bit longer
