Free Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things by Charles Panati Page B

winter and summer solstices, the four solar events that kick off the seasons. The holy day’s shift began with the Romans.
    Under an ancient calendar, the Romans observed March 25, the beginning of spring, as the first day of the year. Emperors and high-ranking officials, though, repeatedly tampered with the length of months and years to extend their terms of office. Calendar dates were so desynchronized with astronomical benchmarks by the year 153 B.C . that the Roman senate, to set many public occasions straight, declared the start of the new year as January 1. More tampering again set dates askew. To reset the calendar to January 1 in 46 B.C ., Julius Caesar had to let the year drag on for 445 days, earning it the historical sobriquet “Year of Confusion.” Caesar’s new calendar waseponymously called the Julian calendar.
    After the Roman conversion to Christianity in the fourth century, emperors continued staging New Year’s celebrations. The nascent Catholic Church, however, set on abolishing all pagan (that is, non-Christian) practices, condemned these observances as scandalous and forbade Christians to participate. As the Church gained converts and power, it strategically planned its own Christian festivals to compete with pagan ones—in effect, stealing their thunder. To rival the January 1 New Year’s holiday, the Church established its own January 1 holy day, the Feast of Christ’s Circumcision, which is still observed by Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and many Eastern Orthodox sects.
    During the Middle Ages, the Church remained so strongly hostile to the old pagan New Year’s that in predominantly Catholic cities and countries the observance vanished altogether. When it periodically reemerged, it could fall practically anywhere. At one time during the high Middle Ages—from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries—the British celebrated New Year’s on March 25, the French on Easter Sunday, and the Italians on Christmas Day, then December 15; only on the Iberian peninsula was it observed on January 1.
    It is only within the past four hundred years that January 1 has enjoyed widespread acceptance.
    New Year’s Eve . From ancient times, this has been the noisiest of nights.
    For early European farmers, the spirits who destroyed crops with disease were banished on the eve of the new year with a great wailing of horns and beating of drums. In China, the forces of light, the Yang, annually routed the forces of darkness, the Yin, when on New Year’s Eve people gathered to crash cymbals and explode firecrackers. In America, it was the seventeenth-century Dutch, in their New Amsterdam settlement, who originated our modern New Year’s Eve celebration—though the American Indians may have set them a riotous example and paved the way.
    Long before settlers arrived in the New World, New Year’s Eve festivities were observed by the Iroquois Indians, pegged to the ripening of the corn crop. Gathering up clothes, furnishings, and wooden household utensils, along with uneaten corn and other grains, the Indians tossed these possessions of the previous year into a great bonfire, signifying the start of a new year and a new life. It was one ancient act so literal in its meaning that later scholars did not have to speculate on its significance.
    Anthropologist Sir James Frazer, in The Golden Bough , described other, somewhat less symbolic, New Year’s Eve activities of the Iroquois: “Men and women, variously disguised, went from wigwam to wigwam smashing and throwing down whatever they came across. It was a time of general license; the people were supposed to be out of their senses, and therefore not to be responsible for what they did.”
    The American colonists witnessed the annual New Year’s Eve anarchy ofthe Indians and were not much better behaved themselves, though the paucity of clothes, furnishings, and food kept them from lighting a Pilgrims’ bonfire. On New Year’s Eve 1773, festivities in New