(FORTUNE Magazine) – Overly serious students of business--to which category I consign us all--know that every year, in retrospect, organizes itself into a unifying concept for purposes of analysis.

The year 1984, for instance, would have nicely hung its key events around the concept of Greed, with Icahns of excess parading around collecting more and more debt and equity and 14-bedroom apartments on Park Avenue filled with illegal domestics and insanely rich foie gras.

The year of the October crash, 1987, would have told the tale of Diminished Expectations, with hopes curbed, growth curves flattened, and personal investments (particularly those of dolts stupid enough to have listened to my pal Rufus Feinster when he said to get into penny energy stocks) dashed to earth.

Likewise, any year in the early 1990s would have spoken powerfully of Retrenchment, of cutbacks producing wider margins, smaller lunches on larger plates, and increased productivity from people being forced to do 16 jobs instead of our customary 9 1/2.

This year it was all about Size. The deals were not just big, they were enormous. Unless you were talking about nine zeros, it was time to go home. If you owned an ocean liner, you had to acquire the ocean it floated on. Whales merged with dinosaurs. My debt had to be bigger than yours. Next to mine, your assets must look puny too. The world divided itself into titans and dwarves, and it was clear which side you were required to be on. The large were in charge.

Big was good, ipso facto, a priori, QED. It makes sense that in a universe where size is all, the dimensions of the questionable, stupid, naive, vain, foolish, excessive, gross, and pleasantly idiotic events that shaped the year--as well as the good stuff--would be gigantic as well. And so they were, bad and good alike.

On the positive (if slightly scary) side, any celebration of the enormous must start with a tip of the whiskers to Disney, which bulked up to behemoth status with two monstrous moves--the colonization of Capital Cities/ABC and the conquest of Mount Ovitz. These, though large, were just the most obvious promontories in this year of mountainous mouse-kabucks. IBM ate Lotus and then lost Jim Manzi, its overly crusty chief executive. Enough already. Let's move on!

Chemical got Chase, one of many lusty financial institutions that just couldn't stay single anymore, and gave hope to those who are worried that their bank isn't big enough. IPOs that made their authors billionaires within hours popped like fresh biscuits from the mercantile oven. Even when we fell apart, we did it big, as AT&T broke up in one of the biggest corporate deconsolidations of all time.

And Microsoft! Can we say enough about Microsoft, which tore like a hungry tapeworm through American life, munching and marketing and growing ever huger, ever more efficient, capable, omnivorous, omniscient, omnipresent? The Gates of the Future are open--now! Step inside, or don't! We don't care! We'll just start the next century without you!

But as inspirational and fabulous as some of the big stuff was, even more tasty were the events that stunk up the joint. The robber barons, flagrant sycophants, creeps, litigious jerks, and miscreants were outsized too this year, attaining truly outlandish proportions, and we therefore step forward with hat in hand to cherish them. Leading the pack, here comes Jim Henson's Muppets, this time violating, says Hormel, the copyright sanctity of America's favorite mystery meat--Spam! Miss Piggy vs. Spam? Whose side are you on? Nick Leeson, that bumbling nitwit, rewrote the scale on which one may screw up and not be killed. And look! There's Michael Milken! He's back, and under his arm he has what? Fifty million dollars? Who in the world would give him that for...advice! Well...er..Who am I to point fingers over complicated transactions such as these?

So thanks indeed to one and all, the great, glorious performers of 1995. Here's to all of you, gigantic toads and toadies, enormous vertical integrators, Herculean aspirants to mammothness that made this year the titanic experience it was! Take a bow, guys! We salute you!

In the biggest possible way, of course!