We now know that Pittsburgh won't be dropping the ball on properly celebrating New Year's.

	Kurt Weber, Post-Gazette Atop the Highmark Building, Downtown, sits a 1,000-pound ball, which will be raised to the top of a 74-foot pole on New Year's. Click photo for larger image.

Downtown's "First Night" on Sunday will for the first time climax at midnight with the raising of a giant, glowing ball atop Penn Avenue Place -- the former Horne's department store turned Highmark headquarters.

"The Future of Pittsburgh" is signified by the ball rising, rather than dropping as the one does in New York.

You've likely seen that ball in Times Square, at least on TV. But you might not believe all the weird stuff rising and dropping to ring in 2007 all over the country, from Flagstaff, Arizona's pinecone to Port Clinton, Ohio's 20-foot, 600-pound "Wylie the Walleye."

The eastern part of Pennsylvania is a real hotbed, and the trend is rising. In the chocolatey Dauphin County town of Hershey, they started last year, raising a replica of a foil-covered Hershey's Kiss.

As noted in a brief article in the current issue of the state Department of Community and Economic Development's Pursuits magazine, Pottsville (Schuylkill County) will once again raise a mock green beer bottle. It's in part a toast to America's oldest brewery, which is located there: Yuengling. But alas, the bottle contains only air.

Nonetheless, that celebration would match well with the one held in Lebanon (Lebanon County), where they will lower a 100-pound stick of their famous bologna.

When Wylie the Walleye drops in Port Clinton, Ohio, you know the new year is here. Click photo for larger image.

The town of Red Lion (York County) will mark its cigar-making by raising a cigar, held by a lion, an official clarifies; it's all made out of wood by "a couple of the handy people in town."

Elizabethtown (Lancaster County), where they make M&M candy, will drop a huge, inflated M&M.

"We lower. We do not drop, as per request by MasterFoods" (division of Mars Inc.) says the local chamber's Althea Johnson. And they lower early, at 7 p.m., not because it's kid-friendly, but because that's when 2007 hits its sister city of Letterkenney, Ireland.

Dillsburg (York County) will lower/drop an 8-foot-tall pickle, even though the town was named for a person, not a cuke.

The list goes on and on: York lowers a white rose. Lancaster raises a red one.

The list gets weirder and weirder: Says the Chamber of Commerce in Mechanicsburg (Cumberland County), "We will celebrate the arrival of the New Year with the dropping of the wrench at midnight." Hummelstown (Dauphin County) does a Lollipop Drop.

Why haven't more Western Pennsylvania towns gotten the drop on this?

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"You don't have to be a large community to make it happen," says Charles A. Schulz, special events director for the Department of Parks & Recreation in Harrisburg.

The capital will ring in this New Year by dropping a giant strawberry, as it has for the past 17 years. (Except for the one year when it dropped a strawberry-painted cow, but residents don't like to talk about that.)

"In our area, we drop a lot of stuff," says Mr. Schulz, who has heard of tiny Falmouth (Lancaster County) dropping a stuffed goat. He figures that some towns may have copied off Harrisburg's strawberry.

It was picked because of the completion of Strawberry Square that's on Strawberry Alley along with the Hilton Hotel, down which the big berry drops. Most revelers may not even know the significance of the berry, but they have a blast.

The big party in New York City's Times Square dates to 1904, but the dropping illuminated ball was started in 1907 by New York Times owner Adolph Ochs, whose first one was made of iron and wood and 100 light bulbs. (The original actual purpose of such "time-balls," notes the Times Square Association, was for seamen to synchronize their chronometers.)

Today's New Year's Eve Ball, watched by the world, is covered in 504 Waterford crystals -- 72 of them new this year, featuring dove patterns symbolizing peace.

There will be another treat for New York revelers this year: Zambelli Fireworks, based in New Castle, will provide a newly enhanced, computer-choreographed display of pyrotechnic effects to "Auld Lang Syne."

Pittsburgh's new rising ball, as previously reported, was constructed out of recycled materials symbolizing the city's leadership in "green" building.

Commerce and community pride aside, Mr. Schulz leaves it to the psychologists to figure out why humans go to such lengths to so mark the rather arbitrary passage of one calendar year to the next, but muses, "Somehow we want to make things understandable. Somehow this does it."