After a year of news stories, historical milestones, and culturally significant moments, does your brain feel a bit bloated with information? If so, I think you’ll find that nothing purges the system like a good quality “Year in Review.” Whether it’s a “Countdown to the Best ___ of 2012”, a brief cavalcade of footage set to a stirring soundtrack, or something as simple as a concise “top 10” list , there’s nothing more blissfully therapeutic than sipping champagne while snacking on the year’s big stories and historical moments after they’ve been processed into tasty tidbits. We can absorb a year’s worth of newsworthiness in a single sitting, and never bother with analysis because the subtext is always: “Oh – you remember, right? Let’s not relive that again.” And once we’ve consumed these cultural aperitifs, we can flush all those big moments down the pipes of collective memory and find ourselves free and clear to gobble down another 365 days of continuous coverage.

So to celebrate the close of another year, here’s a countdown of my Top 5 2012 recaps:

5. Google Zeitgeist 2012

It seems like everybody’s favorite search engine is feeling pretty self-important this year, but if you’re ready to get googly with your year-end-recap, here you go:

4. The Year With Katie Couric

For truly in-depth coverage of topics like Honey Boo Boo and the DeVito/Perlman split, you can definitely count on Katie. Watch it here..

3. Tiny Tonight! 2012: Year in Review

Nobody does a countdown like VH1. Now they’ve condensed the whole year into “a hot mess of sassitude.”

2. Good Morning America – Year’s Top Stories

Nobody makes tough topics easier to digest than Good Morning America:

1. Facebook Stories

If you’ve spent most of your year on Facebook, you can take your already concise snippets of personal info and condense them even further into a “year in review” of your very own.