New Year's Traditions
(A confused humanity always thinks “today’s opinions are OF COURSE the right ones.” In actuality, superstition and pagan prejudiced “logic” are how matters of ‘church/state’ and ‘intelligent design’ and the like are decided by pagan judges and “experts” both then, and today. Not truth, honesty, integrity, or science. The pagan agenda, fears, superstitions, hatred of Accountability, and prejudices always cloud the truth from one’s eyes. It’s always been that way, and as Paul said, “It is the same now.” Enjoy some history, below, and consider that “they” all thought THEY were “civilized” too—just as the pagan “experts” do, today. It’s kind of humorous really, to “look in the mirror,” if we’re honest enough to then view our current day properly, as well. : ) See “The Peanut Butter Principle” for more about Peanut Butter thinking : ) )
New Year’s Traditions—How we got to be so “civilized” and haven’t changed at all
Why do the Spanish stuff twelve grapes in their mouths at the stroke of midnight? Why won’t Scots allow a short, blonde physician to cross the threshold first? And why do Norwegians hide one almond in their rice pudding?
All for the same reason: Good luck for the New Year.
The Spanish must be rather unlucky because, as we hear, hardly any of them ever manage to eat their twelve grapes before the last stroke of the clock.
The first visitor on Hogmanay, the Scottish New Year, has to be male, tall, dark and handsome and bring some booze—no doctors, ministers or gravediggers, please. “First footers,” as they are called, have the right to claim a kiss from every lady of the household.
In Norway, the person who finds the one whole almond in their portion of rice pudding will enjoy guaranteed wealth in the new year... or, we presume, choke to death at the end of the old.
Almost every country has its own traditions, but how much do we actually know about this holiday? Why is it on January 1, and has it always been that way? Here are some fascinating facts about the (Western) New Year.
Before 45 BCE, the means of time tracking in the Roman Empire was the Roman Calendar, which consisted of only ten months and started the year with the vernal equinox around March 21. “Around” because in those days, people used the calendar in a rather, shall we say, generous way: The 304 accounted-for days were customarily followed by an unnamed and unnumbered winter period.
In the 7th century BCE, February and January—in that order—were inserted between December and March to fill the gap, adding up to a year with 354 or 355 days. (The two months were switched to their current order in 450 BCE.) In some years, to make up for the lack of days, an extra month called Mercedonius or Intercalaris was added.
This rather lackadaisical handling of the calendar opened the doors for all kinds of tampering. According to an online museum, “[P]riests in the Roman Empire exploited the calendar for political ends, inserting days and even months into the calendar to keep the politicians they favored in office.”
Julius Caesar eventually got tired of the chaos and decreed that a new time tracking system be used, now called the Julian Calendar, with 365 days per year, starting on January 1, with one leap day added every four years. To catch up with the seasons, Caesar had to prolong the year 45 BCE for 90 days, making it the only known 445-day year in history.
However, things were still far from running smoothly after the launch of the new calendar. Around 9 BCE, it turned out that the priests in charge of the calendar had added a leap day every third year instead of every fourth; so there were no more leap days until 8 CE.
The Roman Catholic officials, conscientious in that day, were none too happy with the new rules, either. The peasantry’s wild New Year’s jollity was not to the church fathers’ liking, so in 567 CE the Council of Tours declared that the celebration of the new year on January 1 was a bad idea and had to stop.
Even though the Julian Calendar itself had its flaws (an error of one day every 128 years), the failure to adhere to it seemed the greatest problem at the time.
“Hundreds of years later, monks were the only ones with any free time for scholarly pursuits, and they were discouraged from thinking about the matter of ‘secular time’ for any reason beyond figuring out when to observe Easter. . . [The] study of the measure of time was first viewed as prying too deeply into God’s own affairs—and later thought of as a lowly, mechanical study, unworthy of serious contemplation.”
Consequently, the dates of New Year’s Day were shifted around more or less arbitrarily, ranging from January 1 to March 1, March 25, the Saturday before Easter, and December 25. It wasn’t until the 1600s that most countries agreed on January 1 as the first day of the new year. England stubbornly dragged out this decision until 1750, two years before the British government adopted the Gregorian Calendar.
If you are familiar with the history of our calendar, you may stumble over the last date; after all, didn’t Pope Gregory XIII create the calendar named after him in 1582?
Correct. But some European nations were rather slow on the uptake. While most Catholic strongholds like France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal complied with the papal decree, some Protestant countries refusing to bow to the Pope clung to the old system. Part of today’s Germany, for example, didn’t implement the Gregorian Calendar until 1700—by which time the calendar trailed the seasons by 11 days. As a result, for the duration of over a hundred years, a person could gain or lose one and a half weeks just by crossing certain borders.
Great Britain and the American colonies adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1752, under the British Calendar Act of 1751. To make the shift, the days of September 3 to 13 were removed from the calendar. Millions of people went to bed on Wednesday, September 2, 1752, and woke up on Thursday, September 14, 1752. Reportedly, this led to widespread riots in some rural communities because people believed the government was trying to cheat them out of eleven days of their lives. (D. Casey)
1/3/2006
