New Year’s Eve isn’t just about parties, champagne and noisemakers. We’ve also adopted another ritual for the annual event in January known as the New Year’s Eve resolution. In gyms across the country from Victoria to St. John’s, the nation’s resolutionists will gather in January 2020 to begin new exercise routines. Some of us might’ve given up cigarettes for 2020. Others promised to be better students, daughters, sons and dieters.
Around the world, News Year’s Eve resolutions are a universal tradition with an interesting history. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, started Covenant Renewal Services in 1740 to be held at night or on the morning following New Year’s Eve. Parishioners gathered at these services – also known as Watch Nights – to surrender their resolutions to God, their families and the church.
Long before Methodism, the Babylonians were making resolutions 4,000 years ago. The Babylonians celebrated New Year’s Eve in mid-March at the beginning of the crop season instead of January. Moreover, New Year’s wasn’t just a one-day event for the Babylonians, who held 12-day parties when coronations for new kings were sometimes held. During this annual festival, Babylonians made pledges to their pagan gods with the intent of clearing off their debts. They also returned borrowed items at festival time.
The Roman Senate created a day to honour Janus in 153 B.C. Later, Roman emperor Julius Caesar officially turned January 1 into a New Year’s Eve celebration in 46 B.C. The day and the first month of the year were named after Janus – a two-faced god with an odd habit of living in doorways and arches. Janus could look forwards with one face pointed into the future, while the god’s twinned countenance on the opposite side stared into the past. The Romans gave sacrifices to Janus. They also promised to be honourable people for the upcoming year.
Jess Zafarris in Writers Digest wrote about a magazine submission written by Charles Dickens. The great Victorian writer once prepared an article for the periodical All the Year Round about the Vow of the Peacock, a medieval New Year’s Eve tradition. According to Dickens, peacocks and pheasants represented royalty in the Middle Ages because of their decorative feathers. Peacocks and pheasants also played an important role on medieval knight’s holiday menu. Knights traditionally ate roasted peacocks on New Year’s Eve feasts. Before these special meals began, the knights of the Middle Ages made vows of chivalry directed at the birds in the centre of their dining tables.
In the digital era, New Year’s Eve resolutions have played a noticeable part on social media forums such as Twitter, but some of the resolutions are questionable. MakeUseOf, an online publication, gathered a collection of disposable and irrelevant resolutions made on Twitter from 2018-2019. One resolutionist vowed to keep trying new things after consuming absinthe on New Years in 2019, despite reporting the drink had tasted like NyQuil green death. She didn’t propose a vow of chivalry to a dead bird on the table, but the absinthe resolution still seemed encouraging in an outlandish way. Another resolutionist promised to keep watching every season of the Power Rangers, including the Green with Evil mini-series. I wonder what Dickens would’ve thought of this earnest resolution dedicated to an action series? I think he might’ve been okay with it. Yet, the greatest of these idiotic Twitter resolutions was made on January 10, 2019, where a Tweeter promised to stop listening to Siri’s directions and get lost on their own without the aid of her robotic voice. I agree, believing we should all regain the freedom to go adrift without Siri’s omniscient interference.
