Happy New Year's (and some history to it)

Happy New Year's

New Year’s Day…the first day of, well, a new year.

We don’t know what day was the actual first day of the world, regardless of your religious outlook - it’s just not something we know at the time. However, we do know some history of our celebrations with such.

Nowadays, we celebrate New Year’s on January 1st, but that wasn’t always the case. Let’s see how we got here (in a short way).

One of the earliest New Year’s celebrations was 2000 BC in Mesopotamia. So in Assyria, they used the new moon closest to the autumn equinox (September). And in Babylonia they used the spring equinox (March). And other places…Egyptians celebrated it in September. Greeks, they used the winter solstice (December). Persians, they too used the spring equinox (March). So you can see that globally, New Year’s was celebrated at different times in a year.

But in 153 BC, the Roman Republican calendar made January 1st the official date of New Year’s. And the Julian calendar does the same 46 BC. The Gregorian calendar (which started in 1582 by the Roman Catholic Church) made New Year’s on their calendar Jan. 1st. So the rest of the world slowly followed suit. Scotland switched to January 1st in 1160, Germany and Denmark; around 1700, England; 1752, and Russia; 1918.