New Year, Old Customs
The clock’s struck 12, the date’s changed—it’s a whole new year (and decade)! A time for second chances and fresh beginnings. The world is your oyster!
But then one hears about things like Cathay Pacific flight CX880 that took off from Hong Kong at 00:15 on January 1, 2020 and landed in Los Angeles at 8:26pm on December 31, 2019, with plenty of time to celebrate the new year again. And it wasn’t the only flight to time travel that night! This reminds me, again, that time is a construct. These months and hours are just an abstract idea we’ve imposed upon the interval between the rising and setting of the sun and the cycle of changing seasons.
“The first of January” is just an arbitrary day picked by the Roman king, Numa Pompilius as the first day of the year since Janus was the Roman god of beginnings. The Orthodox Church celebrates its new year on January 14th, as per the Julian calendar. This is why it’s also called the Old New Year. Persian and Turkic civilizations celebrated the new year, or Nowruz/Navroz, on the first day of spring. It is a universal celebration of new beginnings: wishing prosperity and welcoming the future while shedding away the past. Today, it is celebrated by various religious and ethno-linguistic groups all over the world from the Balkans to the Black Sea Basin, Central and South Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. In Thailand, they celebrate new year when the sun moves from Pisces to Aries. This festival is known as Songkran and is characterized by cleaning, washing idols, and splashing water as a wish for plentiful rainfall in the coming year. It is also celebrated in Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and parts of northeast India in different ways.
Other communities calculate their New Year using a lunar calendar or a combined luni-solar calendar. The Lunar New Year is celebrated in China and other countries of East and South-east Asia such as Vietnam, Korea, Tibet, etc. This year, it falls on January 25th , marking the beginning of the Year of the Rat. The Islamic New Year, also known as Hijri New Year, is also based on a Lunar calendar and fall on the first day of the month of Muharram. It is observed differently by various communities and countries. It is a time for self-reflection, historical awareness and gratitude. Rosh Hashanah is the first of the Jewish High Holy Days. It is the anniversary of the day on which the world, and humanity, was created. It is marked by prayer, self-reflection, and repentance for sins committed over the previous year.
Other festivals do not have a cosmic connection. celebrated in India, signifies the triumph of good over evil and is the New Year for some regions of the country. There are also many harvest festivals that mark the New Year such as Baisakhi, Vishu and Bihu. Baisakhi is also important to the Sikh community as it commemorates the formation of the Khalsa order of warriors under Guru Gobind Singh in 1699.
But, regardless of when and why, New Year festivities are among the oldest and most universally observed celebrations. That seems fair. The only way to make sense of the returning seasons was to pick a starting point and roll with. To be clear, I’m not complaining. It gives us a reason to celebrate, to make all our “see you next year” jokes, and to find comfort in the promise of infinite possibility not weighed down by a messy past. And if you’ve had a rough start this January, just pick another fresh start from the list!
-Arista Engineer