Happy New Year!
Of course, we’ve only been saying that on January 1st since relatively recent times. The earliest recording of New Year celebrations is from Mesopotamia in about 2000BC, but that was at the Spring equinox. The Egyptians saw the New Year in at the Autumn equinox, and the Ancient Greeks chose the Winter solstice. The Romans are to blame for January 1st; while their original calendar ran March to December, the second King of Rome invented January and February, and October, November, and December became the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth months, not eighth, ninth, and tenth as their names show. New Year moved to January because it was the start of the civic year, when Rome’s two consuls began their year-long tenure. In 46BC Julius Caesar reformed the calendar and January 1st was officially established as New Year.
This time around, it only lasted five hundred years in Europe. In 567AD the Council of Tours abolished January 1st as the beginning of the year, because the celebrations were ‘unChristian’. March 25th, Lady Day, was voted in instead, the Feast of the Annunciation (and coincidentally the Spring equinox). Lady Day became generally accepted as the start of the year, though there were a few regional variations, and no particular celebrations apart from being a ‘Holy Day’. With the establishment of the Gregorian calendar in 1582, January 1st was reinstated as being more logical; but as it was a ‘Catholic’ thing, the Brits resisted adopting either the calendar or the new New Year until 1752. As January 1st was the old Feast of the Circumcision (it’s now the Solemnity of Mary), this New Year became known as ‘Circumcision style’, while the old New Year was known as ‘Annunciation style’. In Gwaun Valley, Wales, locals still follow the Julian calendar and celebrate ‘Calennig’ on January 13th, just to be awkward.
There are many interesting and idiotic customs followed around the world at this time. In Russia and Slav countries where Christianity was officially abolished they decorate Christmas trees at New Year. Greeks celebrate St Basil’s Day (Jan 1st) with a huge cake-type thing called Vassilopitta which they consume with quantities of coffee after playing cards all night. The Japanese hold parties called Bouenkai or ‘forget-the-year’ where presumably they get monumentally drunk and do just that. A New Year tradition in parts of Germany is molybdomancy or Bleigiessen, which involves sprinkling molten tin or lead into cold water and telling fortunes from the resulting shapes. In the States, there has been a tradition of dropping or lowering a huge crystal ball in Times Square, New York, on the countdown to midnight, and all over America now balls or other objects are lowered or dropped in imitation of this. Among these are kettles, canal boats, French fries, yellow britches, ping pong balls, and a white rose. In Eastport, Maine, the object is a sardine, and in Tallapoosa, Georgia, a stuffed opossum named Spencer. Perhaps the weirdest is in Eastover, North Carolina: a three-foot-tall, thirty pound wooden flea. Only in America…
Today’s saint has to be St Sylvester, a fourth-century Pope who is famous for his death-date (31st December) and a fraud of which he was the posthumous protagonist. A sixth-century pope, Symmachus, wanted to prove the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome once and for all, so he forged documents which stated that Sylvester oversaw the Council of Nicaea (this has been disproved) and cured Constantine of leprosy, for which a grateful Emperor offered him the rule of Rome in perpetuity and decamped to Constantinople. However unlikely, this legend took off and is still current; and Sylvester has given his name to New Year’s Eve over much of Europe. Facts about him are few, but he is the eighth longest-serving pope, at nearly twenty-two years, quite a feat in the fourth century, given that the average papal reign since the Middle Ages is a decade, and before that it was much shorter. He is also the patron saint of Liverpool’s Catholic Cathedral.
Anyway, God bless you, and I’ll wish you Happy New Year in Basque: Urte Berri On, and in Vietnamese: Chuc mung nam moi, because they sound so bizarre.