Humankind has been celebrating New Year’s Day for at least 4,000 years, the first one being recorded in today’s Iraq. As you’d expect, most ancient civilizations connected it to the first day of spring. It was the perfect symbol of a fresh beginning. The ancient Romans originally followed this plan and even had recognition of wintertime banished, assigning it to a period outside their calendar.
But when later Romans decided to add that nearly three-month period of winter back into the calendar year, that made the year eleven weeks longer. New Year’s Day had to be pushed back those eleven weeks — from March 21 to January 1. And so we ended up with this holiday coming a bit later than the winter solstice but far earlier than the first day of spring. Welcome to our holiday which is now in the middle of nowhere, weather-wise.
For me, the holiday is most significant for introducing me to what I call “the third crying.” We all cry for different reasons, but there are three distinct sets of circumstances that have prompted most of the tears in my life.
As a newborn, I am sure that I was introduced to my first cause of crying—tears of frustration—the first time I was aware that I needed feeding, changing, or just a lot more attention. Obviously, some things with me never change!
My second cause of crying came later, when I was a kid. I was at the Indiana State Fair and saw a clown calling people over, as they strolled the midway, and pointing to a pretty flower fastened to his gaudy overalls. He mimed that they could smell it. Of course, when the unsuspecting victim leaned over to do just that, he received a spritz of colored water in his face. With my puerile sense of humor, I thought this was the funniest thing I’d ever seen and laughed so hard that tears rolled down my cheeks. I was startled that I could laugh until I cried.
But it is my third cause of crying that is associated with New Year's Day. I was around eleven years old, and my parents were going to a party. They had asked my much older cousin, Charlotte, to babysit. Her favorite matinee idol, Ronald Coleman, was starring in an old movie on TV and she suggested we watch it. It was his most famous role: the doomed Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities.
Hey, quit that sniggering. I do not gratuitously drag Charles Dickens into every essay that I possibly can. Not EVERY one, anyway. I swear on a stack of Christmas Carols that this incident actually happened. In the final scene, Carton was in line awaiting his execution at the guillotine. Directly in front of him was a poor little seamstress, guilty of nothing, who was also about to be sacrificed to the blood lust of the Paris mob.
She told Carton that she was afraid she’d collapse before her turn to face the blade and have to be dragged to her death. Carton calmed and soothed and comforted her with such compassionate words and loving attention that her courage returned and she faced her terrible fate nobly. Ronald Coleman’s acting was so superb that I found myself silently starting to weep. So here was my third cause of crying: being moved to tears.
It was Sydney Carton’s ultimate kindness to a stranger, when he himself was about to die, that caused me to shed tears at his nobility. And so, for me, kindness has always been linked to the holiday, especially since the last verse of Robert Burns’ Auld Lang Syne, our New Year’s anthem, proclaims:
For auld lang syne, my dear
For auld lang syne.
We’ll drink a cup of kindness yet
For the sake of auld lang syne.
All of us have had to sip too many cups of anxiety, uncertainty, even bitterness lately. In contrast to the last century, our Twenties so far have not been Roaring as much as Shrieking. What better antidote to cups of griping than one of kindness? Perhaps if we all try to move others with our compassion, humankind will move — just a smidge — toward Human Kind.
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here