Custom greet

There is a preferred place to make a New Year’s wish to raise its chances of coming true. For many Americans, and visitors to the United States, a favorite place to make that wish is at the New Year’s Eve Wishing Wall in New York City’s Times Square.

Mexican Ana Cecy Malacara made a wish there on New Year’s Eve of 2024 a year ago and it came true when she returned home after her holiday-cum-wedding trip from NYC.

Malacara wrote her wish for a new baby on a piece of Times Square confetti, which was among millions tossed from the rooftops of the Manhattan tourist spot when midnight struck on 1 January 2024. Grecia Serrano was born on 15 August 2024.

The Wishing Wall is located on Broadway between 46th and 47th Streets, the New York Post (NYP) reports.

The Times Square Alliance, which runs it, said 100,000 wishes were collected since 2 December from wishers from 150 countries, according to NYP. The 3,000-pound confetti turned into a spectacle of 25 million pieces of shredded paper fluttering over Times Square a second after the 2025 New Year’s Eve countdown on Tuesday.

Aside from wishing, the customary New Year’s greeting is also a staple at the end of December. The 2025 greetings made by several million people around the world were impersonal though.

Artificial intelligence-powered chatbot Meta of WhatsApp answered a query from Economic Times on how many asked it to write a New Year’s greet. It estimated receiving one to five million requests two days before the New Year.

Meta said each request was unique but repeated phrases were used on similar requests.

Most of the personalized greeting requests to Meta, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini AI chatbots were in English.

ChatGPT gave its impersonal New Year’s greeting, wishing everyone a 2025 filled with the wonder, happiness and success that they deserve.