Politics drove New Year’s evolution

Like everything else, it came down to politics.

We used to celebrate New Year’s Eve on the vernal equinox, on the shortest day of the year. (My birthday). Change of seasons and all that. Made sense.

But along about 153 BC, some officious Romans decided that since the elections were held on Dec. 31 and the pols took office on Jan. 1, that was enough reason to change the calendars. The calendar printers were furious since they used rocks instead of paper at the time.

In those days, every society had its own customs and celebrations and a wide variety of New Year’s dates. That made party planning extremely difficult. You can’t have a big New Year’s party when half the world has a different date on their cave wall.

Those madcap Europeans, for instance, celebrated New Year’s on March 25, for reasons known only to them. Enter Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. Greg had the good sense to change the party date to Jan. 1. Catholic countries adopted the practice immediately, but many other countries, suspicious of papal power, continued their disparate New Year’s dates until they missed too many parties.

When they finally all decided on a date for the annual party, they had to decide how to celebrate. It was agreed that it was a day to abolish the past to allow for the rejuvenation of the new year. No one knows when it was agreed to drink as much fermented fruit and vegetables as possible, then try to drive the ox cart home. Rituals included purgations, purifications and exorcisms (thank God we have moved onto Dick Clark), extinguishing and rekindling fires, masked processions honoring the dead and other forms of “entertainment.”

Often exorcisms and purgations were performed with much noise as if to scare away the evil spirits. That’s why we make so much noise and wake up hoarse in the morning.

In China, the celebration included Yin, the forces of light, fighting Yang, the forces of darkness, with cymbals and firecrackers, which made many Chinese unwelcome at many parties.

White settlers thought they brought the idea to America, but they found that American Indians already honored New Year’s Day with fires, explosions of evil spirits, and other celebrations. The need to party in the winter was pretty much universal, they found.

It was almost always part of the celebration by kissing your sweetheart (or someone else’s) when the clock struck midnight.

Along the way, some killjoy invented New Year’s resolutions to ruin the good time.

They were seen as simply another way to wish away the past in exchange for hopes of the future. It is where the phrase “turning over a new leaf” originated. Luckily, all resolutions are forgotten by February.

The very worst part of the holiday (except for the hangovers the morning after) is the attempt at singing “Auld Lang Syne.”

No one, I mean no one, knows the words and most people end up just humming along.

The learned among us report that the song, which may or may not have come from Bobby Burns, is “one of the great expressions of the tragic ambiguity of man’s relation to time, which mixes memory with desire, carrying away old friendships and bringing new, turning childhood escapades into old men’s recollections, making change the very condition of consciousness, and at the same time the creator and the destroyer of human experience.

“All this is done in the purest folk idiom, with no abstract statements or generalizations, except for the chorus itself, which states in simple but powerful terms the question that lies at the heart of so much human emotion.”

Wow. And I thought it was drunken mumbling. When you go to the party, start singing these original words and see if anyone notices. See if you end up on the lawn outside of a locked door.

Sing it!

Should auld acquaintance be forgot

Tho’ they return with scars?

These are the noble hero’s lot

Obtain’d in glorious wars

Welcome, my Varo, to my breast

Thy arms about me twine

And make me once again as blest

As I was lang syne.

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.