You would have a hard time finding a holiday that is more universal and at the same time more unique than New Year’s Eve. The years go by regardless of culture or creed, but without the religious importance of Christmas, for example, or the political importance of U.S. Independence Day, for example, it is difficult to place the new year in the canon of the calendar.
A celebration of time more than anything, here is a brief history of New Year’s Eve, how we observe it and why …
:: A brief history of January
We don’t try to rain on the parade, but New Year’s Eve is a completely arbitrary party. The Earth year marks the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun, but there is no reason other than tradition for January 1 to be a beginning or December 31 to be an end.
Julius Caesar was the first person to adopt these days. Previously, the Roman calendar tried (and generally failed) to follow the lunar cycle, constantly distracting itself with the seasons and celebrating the New Year at the equinox in March. With the help of an Alexandrian mathematician, Caesar adopted the much more logical solar cycle, with leap years and the familiar beginning of January.
The new calendar was released in 45 BC, but there was a small, though increasingly important problem. The pair had miscalculated, measuring the solar cycle at 365.25 days and not 365.242199, an error of 11 minutes a year. By the year 1000, the Julian New Year was on January 7 and 2021 on January 13.
Inevitably, viewers took a while to check the error and it wasn’t until the 1570s that the Catholic Church decided that something had to be done. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII baptized the Gregorian calendar, the system we use to this day. New Year’s Day had already been January 1 for more than a millennium and a half; thus, he stayed on January 1st.
Now most countries have adopted the Gregorian scheme (although Russia did so only in 1918 and Turkey in 1927), but the global collage of calendars still does not conform. The Chinese New Year stands out among the extreme values (1.4 billion people for whom the bell falls on February 5), while the Islamic calendar is celebrated on August 20th.
:: A time to travel in time (type of)
In an era of global media, the strangeness of the New Year’s Eve show is pretty easy to see. Think of a North American broadcast: at 5:00 GMT it’s “Happy New Year Connecticut,” an hour later it’s “Happy New Year Illinois,” another hour, and it’s “Happy New Year Colorado,” and then three full hours pass until ‘Happy New Year Hawaii’.
In fact, given the relaxed pace at which time drags everyone around and the various time and average zones used by different countries, a person with a fast private jet could theoretically enjoy thirty times in New York.
:: Curious customs
It’s enough, because New Year’s Eve takes into account three things: fireworks, alcohol, and making single people feel bad.
The New Year has always been synonymous with celebration, and the first known New Year ceremony, the 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian festival of Akitu, was marked by 11 days of celebration and orgiastic ritual. New Year’s resolutions go back almost as far: the Babylonians ushered in the new year by apologizing to the gods and promising to do better in the coming months.
The most famous New Year’s Eve party is the “falling balls” in Times Square, but we would assume that many Americans don’t realize that the tradition began as a celebration of the Manhattan-based New York Times newspaper.
When the new Times headquarters opened in the plaza on December 31, 1904, the newspaper housed a fireworks display, but after the embers began to fall on the crowd, a staff electrician replaced the pyrotechnics with the pendulum object we see today. Now it’s a seasonal mainstay, it’s not the only one that falls: to the horror of New York street cleaners, midnight is accompanied annually by 2,000 pounds of confetti.
Recognized by Robert Burns in 1788, the nostalgic Scottish folk song Auld Lang Syne (literally “for times gone by) is still sung at Hogmanay celebrations throughout the English-speaking world.