Siam Villa Guide to History of New Year Celebrations

We have been celebrating the New Year since we were born and sometimes we ask, when did it all begin? There must be a starting point, right? Well, worry not, we have delved into history to check out the interesting facts on the origins of the celebrations and this is what we learned.

4000 Years

We have been celebrating the New Year holiday for four millenia! The earliest recording of the celebrations ca traced back to the Babylonians. On the day that the darkness and sunlight are of equl length, usually in March, they celebrate Akitu. It is an 11-day festical celebrating the victory of Marduk, the sky god, over Tiamat, the evil sea goddess. It is also the time when a new king is crowned or the current one is symbolically renewed.

Different Days

As new civilizations sprung around the world, each had their own date for celebrating the New Year. In Egypt, the yearly flooding of the Nile symbolizes a new year. The Chinese based their celbrations on the second new moon after the winter solstice.

January 1

Celebrating the New Year on January 1st began in Rome. The founder, Romulus based the celebrations with a calendar consisting of 10 months and 304 days. This increasingly grew out of sync with the sun. In 64 BC, Julius Ceasar introduced the Julian calendar to address this issue by adding more months. This is close to the widely used Gregorian calendar today.

Part of his reforms was to name January 1 as the first day of the year, after the Roman god Janus, which is the god for new beginnings. They would celebrate by offering gifts to the god and to one another.

There was a time when January 1 was temporarily replaced by December 25 (the birth of Jesus Christ) and March 25 (the feast of annunciation). However in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII reinstated January 1 as the New Year's day and has been ever since.

We hope this was able to shed a light on the origins of this international celebration. Accross all civilization, it is clear that it is to celebrate new beginnings.

Source: www.history.com