Hopefully by now everyone has recovered from the New Year\u2019s 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\u2019s look at where all the excitement about New Year\u2019s Day began.<\/p>\n
The word \u201choliday\u201d comes from the Middle English halidai, meaning \u201choly day,\u201d for until recently, man\u2019s celebrations were of a religious nature. New Year\u2019s Day is the oldest and most universal of all such \u201choly day\u201d festivals. In ancient times there were no calendars so the time between the sowing of seeds and the harvesting of crops represented a \u201cyear\u201d or cycle.<\/p>\n
The earliest recorded New Year\u2019s 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\u2019s harvest.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
After the Roman conversion to Christianity in the fourth century, emperors continued staging New Year\u2019s 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\u2019s Circumcision.<\/p>\n
New Year\u2019s Eve, from ancient times has been the noisiest night. For early European<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hopefully by now everyone has recovered from the New Year\u2019s 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\u2019s look at where all the excitement about New Year\u2019s Day began.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55412\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}