A young woman had a special little something to put in the shredder at an end-of-year soul-cleansing ritual in Times Square on Monday — cusܫtomized holiday wrapping paper feat💃uring photos of her and her ex.
“I was broken up with a month before Christmas,” said 19-year-old Aliyah McLemore of Manhattan as she readied to feed the൲ specialty gift wrap into the machine as part of Good Riddance Day.
“Before we broke💙 up, I bought it as a joke to wrap Christmas 𝔍gifts with. But the joke was on me,” she said.
McLemore was one of more than 100 people who stopped by the specially set-up shredder on 🤡Broadway between West 46th and 47th streets to rid themselves of bad vibes from the past year.
The event was sponsored by the Times Square Alliance and companies Shred-꧋it International and Count💃down Entertainment.
Washington state tourist Maureen Dexter was declared the “winner.☂” The 40-year-old wife and mother of three chose to shred a photo of herself 70 pounds heavier, gleefully relinquishing it to the machine as the crowd cheered. She called the feeling “amazing” and “epic.”
“It feels so good to be rid of that, for it tꦇo be gone forever,” Dexter🍰 said. “2015 has been a year of change for me. . . . So I’ve been doing things to be more active, healthy and to live a more fulfilled life.”
While folks were allowed to throw in personal items, such as pictures and documents printed from ♓the Internet, others who didn’t have anything specific to shred were given a piece of paper to jot down their worst memory of the year before adding it to the machine.
“I’m shredding my ex-husband of eight years,” said Christina Lozano, a Queens resident who simply wrote his name on a card🐎.
Nancy Bommer, of Jackson Heights Queens, said, “I want to ge🌄t rid of all the bills that I paid on tღime last year, without interest, so that I could use that money for dental care.”
Sylvia Jensen 💧chose to shred her old IRS documents — saying it felt “f🌜reeing.
“I’ve been meaning to do it all year,” she said.Tim To﷽mpkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, told the crowd he wanted to “say good riddance to hatred and divisiveness of last year” — as he shredded a photo of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The shredded paper will be used as confetti for Times Square’s Ne💙w Year’s Eve celebration, according to officials.