New Year's resolution

plural New Year's resolutions

1. A vow that one makes on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day for the coming year.

   He made a New Year’s resolution to quit smoking.

   5 more examples

   Felt that I had reason, from the stupidity of my heart, to fear that my New-Year's resolutions were made too much in my own strength.

   1762 February 26, Seth Coleman, “Journal”, in Memoirs of Doctor Seth Coleman, A.M. of Amherst, (Mass.) […], New Haven, Conn.: Printed by Flagg & Gray, […], published 1817, →OCLC, page 99

   If you direct me, on your authority as a priest of our Church, to renounce these acquaintances as dangerous, and to put by all the books of Dissenters, I am here, ready, from this moment, to obey. It shall be my New Year's resolution.

   1850, [Elizabeth Missing Sewell], chapter XXXIV, in [William Sewell], editor, Margaret Percival in America: A Tale. […], 2nd edition, Boston, Mass.: Phillips, Sampson & Company, →OCLC, page 245

   Young man—young woman! There [the "book of human character"] is the journal of your daily life; there is the remembrancer that records no compliments, no flatteries, only the plain honest truth; blotted it may be with passages of sin and shame, and let us hope here and there with penitent tears; dedicated, let us pray, for its future pages, with a new year's resolution that shall be answered and blessed in the record.

   1869, E[dwin] H[ubbell] Chapin, “The Book of Human Life”, in Providence and Life: Select Sermons Preached in the Broadway Church, New York, Cincinnati, Oh.: Williamson & Cantwell, publishers, →OCLC, page 257

   I never saw but one person who succeeded in keeping a New Year's resolution, and he had pined away so rapidly in his physical and grown so abnormally in his moral man, that it was really painful to look at him.

   1869, George P[utnam] Upton, “The New Year”, in Letters of Peregrine Pickle, Chicago, Ill.: The Western News Company, […], →OCLC, page 78

   The public library is safely and surely a blessing to the community. It drives out the dram-shops faster than New Year's resolutions. It is the friend of good manners, clean homes, and sweet reasonableness.

   1906 December 19, Benjamin Ide Wheeler, “The Things Worth While for a People”, in Proceedings at the Opening of the Seattle Public Library Building: December 19, 1906: The Gift of Andrew Carnegie, [Seattle, Wash.]: The Ivy Press, published 1907, →OCLC