New Year's Day: load of old nonsense

I have always regarded New Year’s Eve with a sceptical eye. It’s possible that this is just a “bah humbug” sort of response but I don’t think so. The G and I were in bed last night (New Year’s Eve) by 2230 and I was asleep by just after 2300 so whatever strange change in the universe’s mystical lines occurred was unknown to me. This morning I awoke and the world looked pretty much the same. Here is the view as I ate my breakfast. It’s not a bad view as views go; at this time of the morning and at this time of the year it’s too hot to sit out with the view of the lake.

The view from the back deck complete with weird totem pole thing

But back to New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. Why is it that a single tick of the clock in a single location (the one you are in) is such a cause for celebration? After all that particular tick of that particular clock holds no particular significance for someone in another time zone. So it’s all arbitrary really.

I saw a post of Facebook yesterday that said something like “I am not planning to make any resolutions for the New Year. I was fabulous in 2015 and I will continue to be fabulous in 2016”. I wish I had thought of that.

I had a quick look at the history of the New Year celebration. The Babylonians, about 3,000 years ago, appear to have celebrated their New Year at the time of the vernal equinox which, as we all know, is on 20 or 21 March (it depends on the position of the sun and the earth). In the southern hemisphere it’s called the autumnal equinox. You will immediately be on to the fact that there must be a September equinox to match up with the March equinox. And you would be right.

If the Babylonians were celebrating the start of a New Year with the onset of Spring then, by rights, an antipodean New Year would be celebrated in September. In fact, that is just how the French Republican Calendar saw things. They kicked things off on 22 September which, if the Babylonians were right, is about when everything starts dying off in the northern hemisphere. There never was any logic to the French and their ways.

The Romans celebrated the New Year on 1 January 153 BCE but it wasn’t until Julius Caesar came along in 46 BCE and introduced a new solar-based calendar that the whole thing got regularised. At least it got regularised in the Western canon. The Chinese did something different at least in part because the Chinese calendar is different from the Julian (and later the Gregorian) calendars. We won’t go there but I think the message is that, because the sun goes round the earth every 365 days, 6 hours, 45 minutes and 48 seconds, we’re all hanging around until it comes back again.

I knew, of course, that when I awoke the headline news on abc.net.au would be trumpeting a Sydney firework display like no other. I expected that the report would tell me that revellers thronged every available space and saw the New Year in with whoops and shrieks. I was not disappointed; this is pretty much what the headline said.

And, as it happened, the day passed pretty much like any other.