New Year's Eve
*Please celebrate wisely and don’t drink and drive or allow anyone who’s been drinking to drive home. Uber and AAA have resources for free and safe trips home.*
On December 31st each year much of the world welcomes the end of the old and the beginning of the New Year.
New Year’s Eve is a time to reflect on the year gone by and to thank God for the blessings He’s granted to us. We ask for mercy for the mistakes we’ve made and ask for the strength to learn from them and we make resolutions for the year to come. The Church exhorts us to pray the Te Deum to gain an indulgence* for the close of the old year in thanksgiving to God for the blessings bestowed therein. The colors for New Year are often gold for luck and white for peace. The inclusion of black I believe is to commemorate the death of the passing Year whereas silver and gold in this regard are used to commemorate time like silver and gold anniversaries. Father Time and Baby New Year both represent how the transition from one year to the next symbolizes the death of one and the birth of another. A custom for the New Year is to have a patron Saint adopt you as their own for the year, here is a resource to do so as well as here.
*scroll to indulgences section of post, sections are alphabetical.
New Year Customs and Folklore
Make This Your Best Year
New Year Recipes (Make 2025 the year for humane living, go vegan!)
New Year TV Specials and Movies
In Memoriam
Autism Friendly NYE
NYE Mental Health
More NYE Mental Health
Pet Friendly NYE
More Pet Friendly Advice
Bulgarian folk tradition assigns the burning of the Yule log to New Year's Eve. An old folk custom dictated that the hearth first be cleaned with a broom made from juniper. At sunset on New Year's Eve the oldest male in the household lights the Yule log. If it burns through the night, the family can hope for wealth and fertility in the year to come. Bands of male carolers roam the streets on New Year's Eve as well as at Christmas time. These carolers, called sourvakari, carry wands made of dogwood branches. They lightly slap people on the back with these wands, wishing them long life, good health, and abundance. Groups of boys may repeat this custom on New Year's Day. In exchange for this blessing people offer the boys coins, fruit, or candy. New Year's Day is celebrated with a large meal, which acts as a charm to ensure a prosperous new year. The bread traditionally served with this meal is decorated with emblems representing vines and bee hives. Banitza, a kind of cheese pastry, is a popular New Year's dish. On this occasion bakers place cornel (dogwood) buds inside the pastry. These buds symbolize good luck and good health for family members and livestock. Grandfather Frost, the Russian gift bringer, visits Bulgaria on New Year's Day.
According to Icelandic folklore, all manner of supernatural events may occur on New Year's Eve. The dead may rise from their graves, animals may speak, and seals may transform themselves briefly into human beings. What's more, elves are believed to be especially active on Christmas and New Year's Eve. Until recently many people left at least one light burning on these nights as a way of welcoming the elves. According to Icelandic folklore, elves move their homes on New Year's Eve. This same lore taught that those who catch the elves in the middle of their move might gain an elvish blessing for good luck and wealth. To this end, it recommended that those who dared risk an encounter with these magical beings sit at a crossroads on New Year's Eve. If an elf traveling on either road wanted to get by, he or she would try to lure the human to move with promises of money, treasure, food, and other tempting things. Those who stood their ground and spoke no word until morning would gain all the promised treasures. On the other hand, if their mood turned sour, the elves could wish ill fortune on the humans who had interrupted their journey.
In past times many people offered the elves hospitality on New Year's Eve by performing special house cleanings and leaving food and lights burning in an out-of-the-way nook or corner. Some walked about their house three times and announced a welcome to the elves, promising them safe usage of the premises for the evening.
Another bit of old lore claimed that frost that drifted into the house through an open pantry window on this night was especially sweet and that it brought with it the promise of abundance. The only difficulty was that in order to collect this "pantry drift," a housewife had to stay awake all night in a dark pantry with the window open to the stern cold of an Icelandic winter night, while the drift slowly collected in a pot on the floor. Once this task was completed, a design made up of crosses was traced over the pot, which prevented the prosperity from escaping.
Many Scots also enacted purification rituals — known as saining — on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. These rituals involved censing house, barn, family members, and animals with smoke, often juniper smoke. Another common good-luck ritual consisted of opening the door at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve to let the old year out and the new one in. Many people accompanied this action by ringing bells and banging on pots and pans. The noise chased away any evil spirits or influences lurking about the house. -Encyclopedia of Christmas and New Year
The Origin of the Ball Drop:
Following the banning of fireworks in 1907, after hot ashes had fallen into the streets, Adolph Ochs, a publisher for the New York Times, wanted to replace them with something. The Times Square ball was inspired by time balls, which signaled to sailors on the seas; sailors set their chronometers after observing time balls with a spyglass. The first time balls were installed in Portsmouth, England, in 1829, and the first in the United States was installed in Washington, D.C., in 1845. The inaugural Times Square ball was made of wood and iron, and was made up of one hundred 25-watt light bulbs. As of 2017, the Times Square ball weighs 11,875 pounds, is twelve feet in diameter, is made up of 2,688 Waterford Crystal triangles, and has 32,256 LED lights. It takes the ball sixty seconds to drop down a seventy foot poll to the top of the roof on One Times Square, where it lands as midnight strikes. Similar events are held in towns and cities around the country. The surrounding geography, culture, and history inspires what is dropped as the new year begins—animals, fruit, vegetables, automobiles, and industrial machinery have all been used. Atlanta has a "peach drop" as Georgia is the peach state; Brasstown, North Carolina, lowers a live possum in a glass enclosure; and Port Clinton, Ohio, drops a six hundred pound walleye. -Checkidday.com
Fireworks Note: Note: Please be considerate of those with PTSD and animals if you set off fireworks this Independence Day. If you're a pet owner and you won't be home, make sure your pet is comfortable. Please leave fireworks to professionals as well because wildlife is affected by fireworks in uncaring hands, instead buy donations for animal shelters.
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