The New Year...

Come December, and the whole world is off in anticipation of the new year. Of course, the new years brings to us....er....new things, well, almost everywhere!!! But what makes new year 'new'? Well, it's nothing more than the 'number' that makes it new. But the rituals and the new ways the world has adopted, makes new year actually a global festival. But whats the background of this new year, and why it starts with January? Well, as always, it again relates itself to Romans!!! 

January is named after Janus, the Roman god of doors and gateways. He was commonly depicted in statues, carvings and paintings as a two headed man with one head facing forward and the other head facing backwards.

 In 46BC Julius Caesar chose January 1st as the first day of the New Year as Janus symbolically represented the door to the New Year. Wild parties and orgies were held on the night before the New Year’s Day as a re-enactment of the chaos which Roman mythology depicted as preceding the cosmos or the ordered world whose organization was set by the gods. Furthermore, by that time, Janus had become, in practice, the highest god receiving the ritual sacrifices of Roman worshippers before the other gods, including the chief god, Jupiter. Strange, but that's what usually happens when humans manipulate religions.

More strange a thing is that, most of the people of the world associate the Gregorian calender to the christians, calling it a 'christian' calender. Well, yes its true, but this truth is only about 400 years old!! Pope Gregory 13th who set the modern calendar, the Gregorian calendar, also officially fixed the first day of the year for Christian Europe as January 1st in 1582.

So next time you celebrate new year, keep it in your mind that you are actually keeping alive, what actually was the custom of Romans (although there arent any serious problems with that). Moreover, you tend to make it bigger than you own religious customs (or new years), when actually your own religious customs make much more sense (atleast to you) than the Gregorian new year!!!