Salt Lake City New Year's EVE spreads 3 nights of holiday cheer

SALT LAKE CITY — New Year's EVE started Thursday night and will continue for two more days.

The annual downtown Salt Lake City celebration features live music, interactive ice sculptures, laser light shows, karaoke, bounce houses, a Mayan "Temple of Boom" that shoots bursts of flames up to 50 feet into the air, hands-on art, garbage can drumming, a ballroom filled with 2,012 beach balls, a projection show reflecting off the sides of nearby buildings.

And, of course, fireworks just past 11:59:59, on Saturday, Dec. 31.

Organizers of EVE 2012, now in its third year, hope the event has a lot of something for everyone.

"It's a way for people to connect in a very unique way that doesn't happen anywhere else," said Jason Mathis, executive director of the Downtown Alliance that organizes the year-end celebration.

The big party could bring 25,000 or more partygoers downtown, he says, up from the 20,000 who attended the past two years, which both faced winter storm warnings.

This year, EVE plays off a couple of themes. One centers on the Mayan calendar-inspired prediction that 2012 brings the end of the world. EVE cheerfully dismisses any impending apocalypse with its slogan: "The End is Just the Beginning."

An outdoor stage plunked down on West Temple is wrapped in canvas, painted with what production manager Eric Leaptrot termed "urban/Mayan fusion graffiti." Five steel barrel fire pots, cut with Mayan-like faces, crown the stage, which will occasionally shoot flames up to 50 feet high.

For three nights, DJ-driven, electronic music will blast from the stage onto a plaza filled with eight giant "interactive" ice sculptures, as well as body-warming fire pits.

Some of the sculptures have facial cutouts, so people can peer out and get their photos snapped as a frozen figure.

From the past two years, organizers learned that in the winter "people like to be inside," Mathis said. So, much of the action unfolds down the first level hall of the Salt Palace Convention Center.

Three giant beavers, the mascots of EVE, overlook the Palace's south lobby. The 25-foot high inflatable figures acquired from the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver Winter Olympics emphasize EVE's other focus: community spirit.