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And a Happy New Year to you!
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Posted on Jan 03 2001
Hopefully by now everyone has recovered from the New Year’s Eve celebration and is ready to tackle the challenging new year-2001. As always we all made resolutions and promised ourselves that we will do better this year. Like you, I made promises and hope that I will carry them out longer then a week. But let’s look at where all the excitement about New Year’s Day began.
The word “holiday” comes from the Middle English halidai, meaning “holy day,” for until recently, man’s celebrations were of a religious nature. New Year’s Day is the oldest and most universal of all such “holy day” festivals. In ancient times there were no calendars so the time between the sowing of seeds and the harvesting of crops represented a “year” or cycle.
The earliest recorded New Year’s festival was staged in the city of Babylon, the capitol of Babylonia, about 2000 B.C. The new year was celebrated in late March, at the vernal equinox, when spring begins. The celebration lasted eleven days. Food, wind, and hard liquor were heavily consumed, for the enjoyment they provided, but more important, as a gesture of appreciation to Marduk, their god, for the previous year’s harvest.
The shift from a March celebration to January began with the Romans. Others before Julius Caesar had tampered with the calendar, but in 46 B.C. Caesar tampered with the year letting 445 days past until it reached January 1. And it has remained so up to this day.
After the Roman conversion to Christianity in the fourth century, emperors continued staging New Year’s celebrations. The Church however insisted that it be celebrated as a religious day in contrast to lingering pagan rituals. Today the Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and many Eastern Orthodox sects celebrate January 1 as a holy day as the Feast of Christ’s Circumcision.
New Year’s Eve, from ancient times has been the noisiest night. For early European
