History and Meaning of New Year’s Eve Celebrations
Although the concept of turning over the year in the solar or lunar cycle is as ancient as human acknowledgment, there has been great disparity about exactly when the “official” turn of the year happens. The earliest recorded celebration of the new year was in Mesopotamia in about 2000 BCE. At that time, the new year was celebrated around the date of the Vernal Equinox. Many cultures followed the cycles of nature as their temporal system, and that meant the new year was usually celebrated between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox. It was decidedly a “return of the light” holiday. Later, the imposition of a man-made calendar assigned the new year to March 1 in Rome.
In fact, the months of January and February did not come into existence until 700 BCE, when Numa Pontilius named and instituted them. Before the revision of the calendar by Julius Caesar, Roman officials noted this date with the installment of two consuls into the highest offices in the land and homage to Janus, the two-faced god of transitions and thresholds. After Julius Caesar revised the calendar in Rome in 46 BCE and was subsequently assassinated, Roman officials in 42 BCE chose to deify him on January first and paid him annual reverence thereafter.
In 567, the Roman Catholic Council of Tours dismantled the celebration of new year’s on Jan 1, citing it as a “pagan” holiday. During this time, the new year was celebrated regionally on different dates throughout Catholic Europe: Dec 25, March 1, March 25 (the Feast of the Annunciation), and Easter represent some of the approved days for celebration of the new year.
But oh, how those rascally pagans persisted! In 7th century Flanders/Netherlands, Roman Catholic Saint Eligius wrote a warning about new year’s celebrations, “Do not make vetulas (little female statues; “vetula” in Latin means “Old Woman”), little deer or iotticos or set tables at night (for the house spirits) or exchange new year’s gifts or supply superfluous drinks.”
In 1582, Gregorian calendar reform reinstalled New Year at Jan. 1, though many countries still continued to observe their own dates and celebrations. Notably, the British Empire (including the US Colonies) did not acknowledge Jan. 1 as the official start of the new year until 1752. Prior to that, British new year was celebrated on March 25, “Lady Day.” New Year’s Eve/Day in the US falls on the borderline between Dec. 31 and Jan 1, in the Gregorian calendar.
Thus, Jan 1 as the “official” new year in the US is a man-made acknowledgment of a natural event: the Earth’s journey round the Sun. After all of the back-and-forth of religious politics around this date in Rome and beyond, we can hardly call it a purely “secular” holiday. So, if New Year’s is actually a spiritual holiday, and specifically a pagan one, there must be vestiges of ritual and meaning in its celebration, right?
Well, yes and no. On one hand, there are all sorts of regional and local traditions to ring in the new year that may or may not have pagan roots or spiritual motivation, but are certainly ritualistic in approach. For example, the song Auld Lang Syne, which is sung lustily and with heartfelt feeling among many revelers across the nation, is an old Scottish folk tune that was “discovered” by Scottish poet Robert Burns in the region of Ayrshire when he heard a farmer singing it. Burns then wrote it down, embellished it, and published it in a book called Scots Musical Museum in 1796. Guy Lombardo, who had heard the tune sung by Scottish immigrants in Canada, first played the song for American audiences on New Year’s Eve at the Roosevelt Hotel in NYC in 1929. Since then, the song has ritualistically welcomed the new year in the US, to the degree that Life magazine once remarked, “that if Lombardo failed to play ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ the American public would not believe that the new year had really arrived.”
In NYC, and across the nation, folks gather in Times Square or around their televisions to “watch the ball drop.” In 1904, newsman and entrepreneur Alfred Ochs purchased the area now known as Times Square, which had formerly been called Longacre Square. To commemorate the name change, he hosted the first of the now-legendary New Year’s Eve celebrations on his new property. In 1907 he commissioned a 400-lb ball to be made of wood and iron, suspended from a flag pole and covered in 100 incandescent light bulbs, to drop and mark the exact hour and moment of the new year so folks could synchronize their watches to the correct time (get it? TIMES Square?)
Nowadays, this custom has…been embellished: from the wooden ball to an aluminum one, to a lighted one, to a neon apple, to the current one. It is reported to be 12 feet in diameter, weighs nearly 12,000 pounds, and is covered with over 13,000 LED lights and 2600 crystals. This year, as every year since 1907 (with the exception of wartime “dimouts” in 1942 and 43), the ball will be lowered slowly over the course of the last minute of the year, reaching fulfillment at the exact second of midnight.
It is likely that any investigation of most contemporary American secular holiday celebrations will eventually lead the researcher to the commercial roots of the celebration, and NYE is no exception. The first Times Square NYE celebration was in honor of a commercial media enterprise. As an icon, the ball symbolizes a lot more than a mere tool for the synchronization of watches. It symbolizes revenue at all stages of its journey: from the money generated by the sale of papers at its inception to the tourism dollars the US reaps from the millions of people who now travel to NYC to participate in the celebrations. The fact that the ball has grown so much in size, weight, and splendor over the years is a signifier of American prosperity and the American ethos of “bigger is better.”
When we look at spiritual or religious holidays in world history, we see what core concepts are at the center of each: family togetherness, community well being, the commemoration of an individual’s rite of passage, the shared desire for revering a particular godhead or deity, or some natural event like a volcanic eruption or an eclipse. When we assess American New Year’s in our conversation however, we see one main theme emerging: the celebration of consuming alcohol.
How do substances figure in to spiritual celebrations? Is there a “right” or “wrong” way to imbibe ceremonially? How holy can New Year’s possibly be if it’s brought to you by Budweiser? To look around Times Square on NYE at all the billboards, flyers, and advertisements one wonders what is actually being celebrated: the alcohol or new year? It’s not as if we are honoring Dionysus intentionally with this cultural celebration of drunkenness, nor Indra, nor any other specific deities of wine or drunkenness. It’s not as if we are celebrating love and community; most of the people in Times Square are out-of-towners who do not know one another. In fact, crime and cruelty are rife at New Year’s Eve in Times Square, and the police presence is a bit overwhelming. So, if we are not gathering around the return of the Sun, nor the deities of wine, nor loving community, what are we gathering around?
Here in the US, what does the turn of the year actually mean to us, collectively? In this melting pot of cultures where there are so many different interpretations of the new year, why do we gather around January 1 at all? Having been stripped of its spiritual significance, what is the relevance of New Year in America, other than as an opportunity to party with friends? Further, when we gather with those friends, what is at the heart of the gathering? Is there a purpose beyond just the fleeting moment of intoxication?
Yet certain aspects of cultural traditions (pagan traditions?) persist, meaningfully. The tiny corn dolls and the wycinaki, or paper cut-out figures of Polish traditional art represent themes far older than Christianity, far older than what we now know as “western civilization.” Like the vitulas given on new year’s that St. Eligius warned against, these little icons are symbols of the Earth Goddess, or the primacy of nature. These symbols of devotion to the Earth represent the heart of hearts around which ancient and modern spiritual celebrations gather, in every culture. They are present in some secular New Year’s Traditions, as well. The black-eyed peas are the bounty of the Earth. The First Footing of Scotland, which features people going around visiting one another’s homes at Hogmanay (new year) with gifts of coal and salt represent that the Earth provides all that we need, and that we are happily always able to share her gifts, whether we can afford other fancy things or not.
Sadly, the ready availability of the gifts of the Earth in America is now questionable, with Big Ag controlling most of the food production, with Congress-created dust bowls where there were once verdant marshes, and with laws against harvesting rainwater as emblems of how far we have come from seeing ourselves in gentle partnership with this Earth, rather than as its lords and masters. When the Earth is no longer free, nor considered primary, but has been dominated, corralled, and “owned,” we lose sight of one common denominator around which we might have found meaning together despite cultural differences.
What happens when a culture is whitewashed and no common ethnic traditions can be established? Other traditions arise around commonly shared aspects of the culture instead. In the US, the common aspect around which most of our traditions gather is money. Not abundance, but money itself. Abundance could arguably be represented by the gifts of the Earth freely given, but this land was decidedly NOT freely given. It was taken. When something has been taken, rather than earned or shared, it seems to lose some its spiritual significance.
So, while we Americans are participating in the customs of commerce during our holidays, we are nonetheless looking for meaning as well, and not finding a whole lot at the heart of our own culture. That is sad and unnecessary, because on the whole, our diversity makes us a very strong and wondrous people, and I feel we could learn a lot from turning inward and really looking at ourselves. Yet how often do we see people turning inward toward the spirit of America for a sense of relevance? Instead, many Americans take on the cultural attributes and religions of others rather than looking to our own cultural center for a sense of value, because a lot of us would really hate to admit that we actually worship money under the guise of freedom. It feels dirty and meaningless, doesn’t it? Isn’t it painfully ironic to consider that many of our indigenous and nomadic ancestors, and the ancestors of this land, held certain core values of revering the Earth and life that, due to time, greed, and evolution, we have cast away only to now go begging with fat wallets to gurus from “othered” cultures to teach us once more?
To ask the questions about why secular holidays came to be is to acknowledge how they can be double-edged swords. To honestly ask ourselves what is at the heart of our culture and why it is there deepens our inquiry about it all. To sift through and gather the fragments that are good and dear and loving, to atone where possible (it’s never too late to begin protecting the Earth and treating all beings with respect! Start today!), to leave behind the practices that feel unsustainable, overly-commercial, and ultimately joyless, is redemptive.
A movement away from money as God to Earth as Goddess, and further toward Universe as All-encompassing and spacious enough for everyone, would help. Part of that work includes vesting our secular holidays with a deeper sense of thoughtfulness, love, community, reverence…all those things that have been lost, dismissed, slain, whitewashed, colonized, or converted out of us as being deemed “indigenous” or “pagan.”
Isn’t New Year’s, simply, a celebration of the return of the light? What if we celebrated it as such in a non-denominational way, noting the passage of time as the central attraction? Wouldn’t it be more effective if, rather than creating a 12,000 pound light-up ball that blinks only for one minute once per year and costs the Earth years of sustainability in greenhouse gases from the traveling revelers, we lifted our hearts in gratitude for the Sun that shines every day, for the moon that marks yet other passages of time? What if we dedicated our resources toward resolving the greenhouse effect instead of spending it on alcohol?
In the end, which is always also a beginning, we cannot change the past. We can thank it for lessons learned, grieve our losses, and let it go, like the old year. We can be present in our personal strengths and solutions for ourselves in the new year, and we can begin to collectively resolve to challenge the larger problems that loom over us, to gather around giving and sharing rather than taking and consuming.
This is how the new world could be: centered on love, growth, care, and kindness rather than commerce, addiction, and secret shame. Everyone could still be themselves, but better.
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