A History of New Year's Day

Some claim that the celebration of the new year is the oldest holiday.  New Year's Day which commonly celebrated in the modern West on at the beginning of the Roman calendar has not universally been celebrated on January 1st.

The Jewish, Chinese, and other calendars still in use today identify different days as the beginning of the year.  In history (ca. 2000 BC),  Babylonians for instance celebrated the beginning of a new year on what is now March 23--the beginning of a new year coincided with the beginning of spring.

In fact, January 1 has no real astronomical nor agricultural significance.  It can be argued to represent a purely arbitrary date.

The Romans at first also observed New Year's Day on March 25, but the calendar changed so much at the hands of various emperors that the calendar soon became out of synchronization with the sun.

In order to set the calendar right, the Roman senate, in 153 BC, declared January 1 to be the beginning of the new year.  But tampering continued until Julius Caesar, in 46 BC, established what was come to be known as the Julian Calendar.  It again established January 1 as the new year. It's intriguing to realize that New Year's Day was celebrated on January 1 during Jesus's lifetime.

The early Church condemned the festivities around the Roman New Year's celebration as pagan.  However, later the church began to offer alternative, religious observances on and around New Year's Day. One remnant of these early festivities is the Feast of Christ's Circumcision which is still observed by some denominations on New Year's Day.

The tradition of using a baby to signify the new year was begun in Greece around 600 BC.   It was their tradition at that time to celebrate their god Dionysus, by parading a baby in a basket, representing the annual rebirth of that god as the spirit of fertility.  Early Egyptians also used a baby as a symbol of rebirth.

Although the early Christians denounced the practice as pagan, the popularity of the baby as a symbol of rebirth forced the Church to reevaluate its position.  The Church finally allowed its members to celebrate the new year with a baby, which was to symbolize the birth of the baby Jesus.

The use of an image of a baby with a New Years banner as a symbolic representation of the new year was brought to early America by the Germans.  They had used the effigy since the fourteenth century.