BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE
There was always a New Year, and there was always a New Year’s Day, the first day of the New Year. We owe the Romans our date of Jan. 1, as we owe them for the word “calendar,” the fact that most of the business world uses a solar calendar, and the names of most of the months and days. The first Roman calendar had only 10 months, some named for gods and some just numbered, and began in Mars (March).The months were 28 to 29 days long, linked to a moon cycle, with the Kalends being the first day of the month, the Ides being the 15th or first day of the second half of the month. This calendar was far short of 365 and a quarter days, and there were almost three months of intercalendary days from the end of December before the next Kalends of Mars started the new year. Sometime around 700 BCE, the king of Rome, Numa Pontilius, added Januarius (named for the two-faced god Janus) and Februarius (named for a Februa, a purification festival) to make 12 months, but the year still began on the first of Mars. In 153 BCE, the date of the new year was moved to the Kalends of Januarius, because this was the start of the Roman civil year, when elected and appointed officials took office. In 46 BCE, Julius Caesar reformed this calendar by adding extra days to 11 of the months, to give us the Julian Calendar, very similar to the one we use today. After Julius’ death, he was deified, and the month of Quintilius was renamed Julius (July). His nephew Octavius, who ruled as the first emperor of Rome under the name of Augustus, was also later deified and the month of Sextilis was renamed Augustus.
The very first celebration of a new year that archeology records was far earlier than all this, about 2000 BCE in Mesopotamia, and was held at the spring or vernal equinox. The Persians and Phoenicians used the autumnal equinox to begin the year, the Egyptians reckoned theirs from the Nile flooding, and the ancient Greeks used the winter solstice as the signal of a new year beginning. In Asia, the lunar calendar was never abandoned, but rather elaborated upon endlessly and adapted to various agricultural cycles. Most lunar calendars start their months on the day of the new moon (thus Chinese New Year starts on the day of the second new moon after the winter solstice). Lunar calendars either have mechanisms for adjusting to the solar year, as does the traditional Chinese calendar, or else they just ignore the solar year and let the traditional months migrate at will, as does the Islamic calendar. There has been a remarkable (although I suppose not surprising) similarity through the years and across cultures in the ways that people celebrate the New Year, no matter when it occurs. Recurring themes include gift-giving, celebrating elders and newborns, bonfires or fireworks, cleaning the home, forgiving sins and debts and releasing grudges, foods eaten for luck in the coming year, and a celebration of newness in new clothes and new habits.
In the West, one of the things that varies is the foods eaten for luck. In the American South, the dominant lucky food is black-eyed peas. These may be eaten fairly plain, or dolled up in dishes like Hoppin’ John in the Low Country or made into patties and fried in other locales. Collard greens, flavored with vinegar or hot sauce, are often eaten with the peas (which are really beans). Both of these foods, along with yams, sweet potatoes and sesame seeds, were brought to the Americas from Africa and made their way from the diets of the slaves to the tables of the European ruling class without thanks or even acknowledgement. In the northern U.S., where African slaves were not such an integral part of life, European customs were modified for the new world. Sauerkraut was a frequent “lucky food” of the Germanic or Balkan immigrants.
It’s a wonder that nowhere in the Americas is the wonderful Scottish tradition of Hogmanay preserved. Hogmanay is full of mystery. In the rest of Britain there are no distinctive New Year’s traditions, because all of their midwinter traditions (particularly the drinking) are concentrated into the overly elaborate (at least since Georgian times) Christmas festivities. However, dour and Calvinistic Scotland did not even celebrate Christmas until the mid-20th century! No one knows what pagan culture—Celtic, Viking, or earlier—Hogmanay came from nor even what the word means. It’s really a three-day holiday, starting at the crack of dawn on Dec. 31 with thorough preparation and continuing through all of Jan. 2, which is a Scottish “bank holiday” (what we could call a federal holiday—no mail, everything closed). This is an official government-sanctioned acknowledgement that everyone is going to be completely bladdered, “rat-arsed” and “oot their tits” on the first, and miserably hung over on the second. The main and unique feature of Hogmanay is the practice called “first footing.” This is where careful note is taken of the first person to visit after midnight. They bring a gift and you feed them a meal and a drink. The most auspicious for all concerned is if the first guest is a tall, dark man, which makes tall, dark men suddenly much in demand for about an hour. And then there’s the custom of “saining” (blessing). Early on New Year’s morning, householders drink and then sprinkle the entire house with “magic water” from “a dead and living ford” (a river ford that is routinely crossed by both the living and the dead). Then the house is sealed up tight and burning branches of juniper are carried through the house, allowing smoke to fumigate until it causes sneezing. Then all the doors and windows are flung open to let in the cold, fresh air of the new year. The woman of the house administers “a restorative” from the whisky bottle, and the household sits down to its New Year’s breakfast.
