Something/Someone Old

Happy New Year!

New Year's celebrations, themselves, are Old. Very old.

The earliest recorded New Year’s festivity dates back some 4,000 years to ancient Babylon...For the Babylonians of ancient Mesopotamia, the first new moon following the vernal equinox—the day in late March with an equal amount of sunlight and darkness—heralded the start of a new year and represented the rebirth of the natural world. They marked the occasion with a massive religious festival called Akitu (derived from the Sumerian word for barley, which was cut in the spring) that involved a different ritual on each of its 11 days...During the Akitu, statues of the gods were paraded through the city streets, and rites were enacted to symbolize their victory over the forces of chaos. Through these rituals the Babylonians believed the world was symbolically cleansed and recreated by the gods in preparation for the new year and the return of spring.

In addition to the new year, Atiku celebrated the mythical victory of the Babylonian sky god Marduk over the evil sea goddess Tiamat and served an important political purpose: it was during this time that a new king was crowned or that the current ruler’s divine mandate was renewed. One fascinating aspect of the Akitu involved a kind of ritual humiliation endured by the Babylonian king. This peculiar tradition saw the king brought before a statue of the god Marduk, stripped of his royal regalia, slapped and dragged by his ears in the hope of making him cry. If royal tears were shed, it was seen as a sign that Marduk was satisfied and had symbolically extended the king’s rule.

Imagine if that's what you had to do to remain Prime Minister! "All right, Mr. Blair, strip down so we can drag you around the square..."

Apparently some people in modern times either kept the festival, or did a historical re-enactment of it:

Something New

I tried, but there is nothing new about New Year's celebrations. Even the noisemakers are ancient--originally for driving off evil spirits as the new year dawned. The most recent parts of the celebration are champagne and the dropping time ball in New York City (which, I just found out, was instituted because of a citywide ban on fireworks--they had to replace the fireworks with something). Even champagne and the time ball go back to the early twentieth century.

Certainly, the concept of making resolutions is old as the hills, and as ubiquitous as grass. This, too, began with the Babylonians:

http://www.history.com/news/the-history-of-new-years-resolutions

They also made promises to the gods to pay their debts and return any objects they had borrowed. These promises could be considered the forerunners of our New Year’s resolutions. If the Babylonians kept to their word, their (pagan) gods would bestow favor on them for the coming year. If not, they would fall out of the gods’ favor—a place no one wanted to be.

It didn't stop with the Babylonians, though it took a crappy calendar gone wrong to make the Romans invent their new year's holiday:

A similar practice occurred in ancient Rome, after the reform-minded emperor Julius Caesar tinkered with the calendar and established January 1 as the beginning of the new year circa 46 B.C. Named for Janus, the two-faced god whose spirit inhabited doorways and arches, January had special significance for the Romans. Believing that Janus symbolically looked backwards into the previous year and ahead into the future, the Romans offered sacrifices to the deity and made promises of good conduct for the coming year.

I guess "reform-minded" is one way to describe Julius Caesar!

And it didn't stop with ancient times...

In 1740, the English clergyman John Wesley, founder of Methodism, created the Covenant Renewal Service, most commonly held on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. Also known as known as watch night services, they included readings from Scriptures and hymn singing, and served as a spiritual alternative to the raucous celebrations normally held to celebrate the coming of the new year. Now popular within evangelical Protestant churches, especially African-American denominations and congregations, watch night services held on New Year’s Eve are often spent praying and making resolutions for the coming year.

So, I've wracked my brain and given up trying to find a Something New with a New Year's theme. Not even the drinking of champagne or the dropping ball in Times Square are exactly what you would call new. Although, I suppose in comparison with the festival of Akitu, which is 4,000 years old, a time ball tradition that started in 1914 is a cultural spring chicken.

So here's my New things: my own New Year's resolutions. Feel free to chip in some of your own in the comments.

I hereby resolve to stop eating fast food.
I hereby resolve to decrease my soda consumption over the coming year.
I hereby resolve to exercise at least 3 times a week, and stretch at least 4 times a week.
I hereby resolve to write 4 times a week.

I feel I should have something less banal and more creative. Resolutions are so damned predictable. Everyone wants to improve their diet and exercise.

Something Borrowed

My Borrowed Thing this week is the song Auld Lange Syne, which we borrowed from Robert Burns who borrowed part of it from an anonymous singing old man:

Robert Burns sent a copy of the original song to the Scots Musical Museum with the remark, "The following song, an old song, of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript until I took it down from an old man."[8] Some of the lyrics were indeed "collected" rather than composed by the poet; the ballad "Old Long Syne" printed in 1711 by James Watson shows considerable similarity in the first verse and the chorus to Burns' later poem,[6] and is almost certainly derived from the same "old song".

Should Old Acquaintance be forgot,
and never thought upon;
The flames of Love extinguished,
and fully past and gone:
Is thy sweet Heart now grown so cold,
that loving Breast of thine;
That thou canst never once reflect
On old long syne.

CHORUS:
On old long syne my Jo,
On old long syne,
That thou canst never once reflect,
On old long syne.

Singing the song on Hogmanay or New Year's Eve very quickly became a Scots custom that soon spread to other parts of the British Isles. As Scots (not to mention English, Welsh and Irish people) emigrated around the world, they took the song with them.

Here's one of my favorite versions:

Something Blue

Looks like the Blue Man Group is doing a New Year's Eve performance.

https://www.broadwayworld.com/chicago/article/Blue-Man-Group-to-Ring-in-...

Happy New Year's to everyone.