DUKES FANS
“An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.” Bill Vaughan
This Friday is a big day in most of the world. We are saying, “Goodbye” to the year 2021 and saying, “Hello” to 2022. Here in the US and around the world there will be tons of celebrations, ceremonies, religious rituals, parties, and more as the majority of the world celebrates making a move from one year into the next. The parties and celebrations this year, though, will be very different from the wild revelry that is usually associated with this holiday. COVID is still with us, and the Omicron variant is having a huge effect on celebrations. Many places have put crowd limits, are adopting mask mandates, asking people to provide proof of vaccinations to attend their public events. Some places are doing things virtually rather than in person. Even New York’s famed Times Square celebration, normally one of the world’s biggest, will be vastly scaled back. Proof of vaccination and masks will be required, and attendance will be limited to only 15,00 people at an event that often drew more than 100,000. But even with the changes and adjustments, the world will celebrate the coming of a new year. It is part of human history and human nature to do so.
New Year's Eve and New Year's Day are probably the most celebrated public holidays in the world. For most of the world, that means December 31st rolling into January 1st. That is relatively recent, though. For most of human history, New Years did not mean those dates, and in some cultures, it still doesn't. Seeing December 31st as "2021" and January 1st as "2022" represents the relatively recent triumph of the Western World's sense of time over those of other, more ancient cultures. The calendar with which we are familiar is less than 500 years old, and the idea of starting a new year in January is less than 3000 years old. And it is, when you think of it, strange to be starting a new year in what is for many parts of the world, winter. But the idea celebrating a "new year" is not strange; it has been part of human ritual and tradition for thousands of years.
The first recorded celebrations of a “new year’ come from some 4000
years ago in Mesopotamia, now called Iraq. This was the place most
historians agree urban living, or "civilization", started. And like most
religious and cultural celebrations of long standing, it was tied to
what nature was doing at a certain time. Around the spring and fall
equinoxes, when days and nights were of equal length, Mesopotamians
celebrated both the planting (spring) and the harvest (fall) as days of
renewal for the earth, and especially for the cities and their
surrounding farmlands. “Akitu” was the name of the festival, and
historians look to those ancient celebrations as the first recorded
instances of regular,culture-wide
celebrations of a “new year.” Of course, such celebrations are probably
much older; humans did lots of things long before writing and keeping
records were invented. But once farming and agriculture became mainstays
of human activity large numbers of people simply had to know the when
the ideal times were to plant and to harvest; civilizations depend on
that. So
for thousands of years, it was spring that was viewed as the beginning
of the new year. And why not? Flowers are budding, animals are emerging
from hibernation or returning to feeding grounds and mating, days were
longer, and that cycle of the seasons was noted and revered. The earth
was being “born again,” so observing that time as a “new year” made
sense.
This "spring-as-new year" idea can easily be seen in the practices of many religions, even today. Some of the most significant holidays-holy days-of many religions are in the spring. Easter and Passover, for example, are both about renewal and rebirth, actually and/or metaphorically. Knowing this cycle of the seasons was essential knowledge for us as a species, and humans have long built rituals around our “essential knowledges." So how did we get from the cycle of the seasons being what determines the new year to an almost universal acceptance of January as the new year? What happened?
In 46 B.C.E. Julius Caesar, the then leader of the Roman Empire, faced a challenge. Empires control many peoples and many different cultures across many miles. To operate at peak efficiency, they needed an "empire-wide" sense of time, especially for trade, religion, and law. So Julius invited Sosigenes, a noted astronomer from Egypt, to come to Rome and create a new calendar to unify and regularize the empire's sense of time. This astronomer moved the Roman Empire's calendar from the movable dates of a lunar (moon) based calendar to the more regularly dated solar (sun) based calendar. Doing this moved the start of the calendar year from March (spring) back to January. Further adding to the changes, the Roman Senate decided in 42 B.C.E. to honor the by-then assassinated Caesar by making January 1 a day of tribute to him. This meshed very nicely with Roman religion and symbolism, and it firmly implanted the date as the start of a new year across the Empire. The Romans already had a god of gates and beginnings named Janus, for whom the month of January is named. Janus was two headed, with one head looking backward and the other one looking forward. This became the perfect metaphor for the idea of a new year: look back at what had already happened and look forward to what is yet to come. January had become the start of a "new year" under what became called the Julian calendar.
This lasted throughout the Empire for centuries. But as the Roman Empire broke up, when the new year started again became a confusing mélange of dates. The Catholic Church, in an attempt to create a unified Europe, drew up a new calendar in 1582 under the leadership of Pope Gregory the 13th. This calendar, since called the Gregorian Calendar, is the one in use in most of the world today. It kept the new year as starting on January 1st, and as European Christian countries came to dominate so much of the world, the new year's date around the world gradually came to be January 1st. Yes, there are still cultures and calendars which celebrate the new year at different times among and for themselves; the Jewish, Islamic, Chinese, and Baha'i calendars are all prime examples of this. (They celebrate the new year in the fall, summer, later winter, and spring respectively). But the regular, everyday world we all know, and especially the business and political worlds, now go by the Gregorian calendar and recognize the start of a New Year as January 1st. Saturday will be the start of 2022, regardless of how out of step that is with most of human history.
As we head into this next new beginning, I wish you all a time of thoughtfulness, hope, strength, fun, hope, good spirits, good company, and good food. These are worrisome and challenging times-no doubt about it. But we humans have faced such times before, and with faith, unity, support, consistent hard work, and especially through friendship and through community, we have endured and even flourished in some very important ways. That is also an essential trait of being human-we can often respond to hard times in some pretty remarkable ways. So whenever, wherever, and however you celebrate it, I wish each of you a happy and wonderful start to the new year. We all have a chance to make new history all over again. How about that?! Happy New Year!
No comments:
Post a Comment