I’m still busy being in Beauty and the Beast at Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon, so in the same spirit as last week’s recycled Christmas column, this week I’m recycling (and refurbishing with fresh material!) a New Year’s column from 1995, because, hey, isn’t doing more reusing and recycling one of those things we all resolve to do at New Year’s?
Here in Canada we think of January 1 as the start of a new year, but celebrating the new year on January 1 is a relatively new innovation.
In the Middle Ages most European countries used the Julian calendar (still used by Orthodox churches), and each New Year began, not on January 1, but on March 25: Annunciation Day, the day on which Mary was told she would give birth to the Son of God.
Other cultures continue to celebrate the new year at other times. Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, is celebrated on the first and second days of the Jewish month of Tishri, which usually falls in September. Chinese New Year falls between our January 10 and February 19.
Scientifically, you can’t really pick one over another, because the Earth’s orbit has no beginning or end, so any day can be considered the start of another year’s journey around the sun.
Champagne is another modern New Year’s Eve tradition, because champagne hasn’t been around all that long: it was born around 1700. Legend has long held that the monk Dom Pierre Pérignon discovered it by accident, although that appears to have be more the result of a successful marketing campaign than historical fact: Christopher Merrett, an English physician and scientist, presented a paper to the Royal Society in 1662, long before Dom Pérignon’s supposed discovery, in which he detailed the making of sparkling wines.
(Of course, only sparkling wine from the Champagne region of France can truly be called Champagne, so in that sense, an Englishman couldn’t possibly have invented it, and Dom Pérignon might still be able to make a claim.)
Champagne is made by bottling a blend of wines with a small quantity of sugar. This fuels a second fermentation, the carbon dioxide from which causes the wine to become bubbly. After three to five years, the bottles are uncorked and the sediment removed; then the wine is recorked and is ready to drink.
You may very well be sipping your champagne in between dances on New Year’s Eve. When you dance, you can impress your partner by telling her that what you’re actually doing is “transforming ordinary functional and expressive movement into extraordinary movement for extraordinary purposes.”
The human body can rotate, bend, stretch, jump and turn in an almost infinite number of ways. Different dances are created by emphasizing different combinations of these elements.
We dance because it’s hard-wired into us. Many animals perform dancelike movements in situations similar to human courtship or play, but human dancing is unique because of the symbolism we’ve attached to it.
In some cultures, dances are religious; in some, they can even be a part of work, their flowing movements making a task go more quickly and efficiently (the Japanese, for instance, have a “rice-planting” dance). For most of us, dancing is primarily an opportunity to socialize, sometimes with a strong element of courtship thrown in. (Hmm. Maybe human dancing isn’t all that different after all.)\
When the clock strikes 12, the change from one year to the next is usually celebrated with noisemakers and fireworks–probably a hold-over from age-old mid-winter festivals in which noise helps to frighten away the monster that has been devouring the sun, and ensure the days start getting longer.
With our plethora of overlapping cultures in North America, different families have different traditions surrounding New Year’s, usually involving a ritual intended to guarantee good luck.
Of course, other people’s traditions can sound pretty silly if you know for certain, as I do, that the best way to insure good luck in the new year is to eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day (cheese grits are optional). I suggest you rush right out and buy some.
And Happy New Year, y’all!
