FOR WHAT’S ANOTHER NEW YEAR

The New Year is a worldwide celebration mainly full of parties, costumes, drinking and resolutions (life changing pledges such as getting in shape, quitting/starting habits, learning new skills, etc.) that tend to fizzle within a few months. However, it has fascinating historic purposes (cultural, religious, and economic) with variations ranging from carefully coordinated rituals (underwear, specialty meals, and music), to setting lots of stuff on fire.

For 4000 plus years many cultures, such as the Babylonians, celebrate the New Year as an agricultural event during May or the March vernal equinox (1st full moon). Adding debt repayment and returning borrowed farm equipment, their massive religious festival, Akitu (Sumerian word for barley), involved eleven (11) days of different rituals, celebrated the mythical victory of the sky god Marduk over the evil sea goddess Tiamat, and served important political purposes (New kings crowned; current rulers’ divine mandates symbolically renewed). Throughout the Middle East and Asia, the Persian “Nowruz” (New Day), a 13-day part of the Zoroastrian religion, is still celebrated among an estimated 300 million people. Monarchs hosted lavish banquets dispensing gifts among their subjects: Commoners parading statues of gods to cleans the earth would pretend to be king for several days before being “dethroned” near festivals end.  Imagine that happening worldwide today!

Egypt’s year began with the festival Wepet Renpet (opening of the year), during the annual flooding of the Nile which helped ensure farmlands remained fertile, coincided with the rising of the star Sirius (the brightest star in mid-July), and honored the myth of Sekhmet (a war goddess who had planned to kill all of humanity until the sun god Ra tricked her into drinking herself unconscious).

The Chinese New Year occurred with the second new moon after the winter solstice where their planting season and legend of Nian (a bloodthirst creature preying on villagers who frightened it away with red trimmed decorated homes and burning bamboo) ignites a 15-day festivity with fireworks, debt settling, and 12-months of zodiac animals (rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, pig). Point!  Civilizations have historically developed increasingly sophisticated calendars, typically pinning the first day of the year to random agricultural or astronomical events until the Roman Empire and its church.

Seeking to correct its calendar imbalance, sustain the celebration of Janus (a two faced, look back/look ahead deity), and the vernal equinox (the periodic journey of the Earth around the Sun symbolizing spiritual darkness/death and light/life): Astronomers and mathematicians helped Julius Caesar add January and February; thus, permanently establishing the current 12-month Gregorian Calendar worldwide. Eventually: AMERICA was also CENTER STAGED!

Beating the dropping pickles in Pennsylvania (possums in Georgia), the New York annual descending ball (originally a 700-pound ball of wood, iron and 100 illuminating lightbulbs) has been a world-famous celebration since 1904 (The New York Times relocated into then known Longacre Square, and with the publication’s elaborate annual parties full of  fireworks, convinced the city to rename it “Times Square”). Now, an estimated worldwide one billion people follow the near 12,000-pound ball of electronic wonder: An annual event even COVID can’t stop! Be not forgotten the Scottish folk song “Auld Lang Syne” (days gone by). Translated by poet Robert Burns, Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians traditionally cemented it during New York’s Roosevelt Hotel radio broadcast (1929) asking “auld acquaintance” should “be forgot” as a call:  LEST SINS OF FATHERS VISIT FUTURE CHILDREN, REMEMBER PAST EXPERIENCES!

Continue to read all my columns, by visiting: https://2bspoken.blogspot.com/