Do our New Year’s Celebrations have a tie to pagan rituals once observed, then lost? Perhaps. A desire to make the short, dark days between the end of fall and the onset of spring as palatable as possible seems logical to me.
At this point, I was tempted to launch into a rant about daylight time, standard time and time changing. But I won’t. But I’d like to. Okay, okay. No more.
It does seem quite human to use such time to examine the past year and consider the coming year. The flickering flame of a fire cracking and a pitch-dark night must spur the human mind into self-examination.
Our distant ancestors were rather forced into passing ice-age winters in a cave by the fire. We do know that early on they were capable of plotting seasonal changes. And they could and did make fermented beverages; that they consumed the beverages can only be assumed. That is one way to pass a long winter’s night.
As I know from my comprehensive viewing of our television weather coverage, the winter solstice was on the 21st of Dec. this year. This solstice marks the 24-hour period with the least amount of daylight or the longest amount of dark, depending on your point of view.
I suppose in early agrarian societies praying that winter would be short and the crops next season would be fertile, made perfect sense. A gradually lengthening day could seem like a cause for celebration.
Historically, Winter Solstice celebrations began our new year and lasted several days. So, when did we begin to celebrate the New Year on Jan. 1?
It seems we can trace this to Julius Caesar. Originally, Jan. 1 was decreed by Caesar to honor Janus, the Roman god of beginnings. And his two faces allowed him to look forward into the future and backward into the past.
A Jan. 1 observance fell from favor, but was revived by the Roman Catholic Church with the acceptance of the Gregorian calendar.
We celebrate new beginnings filled with hope. We undertake reflective assessments of the past year and promise ourselves we will do better.
From my prospective, our celebration of New Year’s is about both beginnings and endings. It is a time of reflection. We assess more than the agrarian needs of the group today. It is not totally surprising we have narcissistically made it about us.
Perhaps Oprah was correct when she said, “Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.”
There is an acknowledgement of our struggles over the past year, then an assessment of our potential, followed by a resolution to do better in the future.
We make resolutions, but we rarely keep them because the behavior we wish to eliminate is stubborn and we are not.
Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough. – Mark Twain
