Time ends up figuring out where you will be at the time the new year begins and who you will be with. According to some superstitions, German and English folklore has credit for popularizing the idea that with whom you are on New Year’s Eve you will predict how the new year will go. And these days there are a lot of chances that, if you’re with someone, you plan to give or receive a kiss at midnight.
The exact origins of the popularity of this custom in the United States are unclear, but, like this superstition, it probably also has German origins. The New Year’s Eve festivities of German immigrants in the mid-19th century would have helped spread the idea of sounding the year with a kiss, says Alexis McCrossen, a holiday expert and author of Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life.
She notes that one of the first references recorded at midnight on New Year’s Eve is in New York on January 3, 1863 in New York. Time report on the festivities in New York City. “New Year’s Eve is a fantastic time for Germans, who gather around the home, their public halls, their clubhouses, their theaters, their concert halls and their breweries, or small breweries, to spend the declining hours of the old year, with music, song, drama and farce, good joy and gladness, ”the article explains. “When the clocks sound at midnight, this whole party stops for a moment, to hear it, and when the last time it dies in silence, all the young and old, old and young, men and women , push each other. and abundant kisses twirl like lipstick rolls, with the exclamation “Prost’s Neujahr!” (Hello New Year!) Ladies and gentlemen in full bloom as young people wholeheartedly approve of this custom, and their venerable predecessors seem to enjoy it too, if it only exists for “Auld Lang Syne!”
It was no coincidence that this tradition extended beyond the city’s German immigrant community.
“Cities started to get bigger, more and more immigrants arrived, and immigrants from Europe wear customs related to New Year’s Eve,” says McCrossen, who is a history teacher at Southern Methodist University. “The Germans had a great influence on American culture and rituals.”
Part of the reason for this influence had to do with a deeper and more troubling truth about the way American society looked at immigrants from different nations. As McCrossen puts it, “Germans were considered more respectable than Italians and other groups.” When it came to adopting the customs of nineteenth-century newcomers, perhaps a natural progression to an American culture that McCrossen describes as “super tense” because of the residual Puritan influence, it was considered more acceptable to copy the German traditions, so these were the traditions that often went faster into the mainstream.
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Shortly after those German immigrants began to set a New Year’s example, another important influence spread to American cities: electricity.
After the introduction of electric lighting in the 1880s, nightlife options began to proliferate. That’s when it became normal for people to go out on the city on New Year’s Eve and stay out until midnight. “That’s when the habit of toasting ends,” McCrossen says. And for loved ones who toasted at midnight, it would be natural to share a high school diploma. Shortly afterwards, the 1907 pyrotechnics ban forced New Yorkers to find a new way to celebrate it, so the fall became a New Year’s tradition. Soon, many of the New Year’s rituals we recognize today were known nationally and internationally.
And inevitably, Hollywood movies have also helped popularize the New Year’s Eve kiss, since the midnight confession. When Harry met Sally, which may have helped set high expectations for this disappointment, to Fredo-Michael Corleone’s decidedly unromantic kiss Godfather II.
The fact that there is no history of specific origins for New Year’s Eve is certainly ammunition for people who think the effort to find someone to kiss at midnight on New Year’s Eve Year is exaggerated. But for those who really want to follow what is now a firmly established tradition, its mysterious history does not seem to diminish its appeal and, in fact, its improvement.