Their New Year Starts at 2 p.m.

Nostalgia has no night like New Year’s Eve. And few had as much room to reminisce as 40 couples marking more than 50 years of marriage in a New Year’s bash at a Boston hotel. The partygoers gathered at the Parker House Hotel for dinner and dancing to swing music of the ‘30s and ‘40s and the traditional counting down of the New Year at 2 p.m., a few hours early in a scheduling change made for convenience and not because of the ages of the revelers, hotel management assured. One of the attending couples had even spent their honeymoon at the Parker House and still had a receipt of $4.80 for Nov. 6, 1934. “It was $4.50 for the hotel room and 30 cents for two phone calls,” said Robert R. Turner, 74. “It brings back a lot of memories.” Others recounted reasons for the longevity of their marriages. “I told my wife years ago that our marriage was like apple pie: a little bit of crust and a lot of applesauce,” said Leo Lombardo, 72. “We have our good days and we have our bad days, but whatever comes our way, we share it.”

--Have a care, bears. In Poland, a freewheeling translation of a children’s classic has changed the sex of the beloved bear Winnie-the-Pooh from male to female. In the new edition of the A.A Milne story, Kubus Puchatek, Winnie-the-Pooh in Polish, is now Fredzia Phi-Phi, a female name. And, to add insult to injury, translator Monika Adamczyk used “news media jargon which ought not to be offered to young readers,” one reviewer said. Asked about the new translation, a Warsaw University professor replied: “If you want to correct the King James version (of the Bible) you must offer something equally beautiful, otherwise all the effort will be in vain.” There was no explanation for the changes. “Winnie-the-Pooh” is enormously popular in Poland.

--The British selected Anglican church envoy Terry Waite and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as Man and Woman of the Year in a poll of domestic radio listeners by the British Broadcasting Corp. Waite, who has made several trips to the Middle East to work for the release of Americans held hostage in Lebanon, replaced last year’s winner, Irish rock singer Bob Geldof, who organized a campaign for African famine relief. Thatcher returned to the top spot in the poll after holding it from 1982 to 1984 and then losing it last year to Princess Anne.

--A Texas woman celebrated her 107th birthday but wasn’t admitting anything about her age. “That’s a lie,” Lena Medlin of San Antonio said when confronted with her age. “I’m sweet 16 and never been kissed. No, no, that’s a lie, too.” Medlin attributes her longevity to a “right” life style. “I lived right. No smoking. No drinking.”