New Year's Day

History

January 1 has no astronomical claim on the new year. Tradition credits Numa Pompilius, around 715 to 673 BCE, with reordering the Roman calendar so that January replaced March as the first month, though that attribution is traditional rather than documented; there is evidence that January 1 was not made the official start of the Roman year until 153 BCE. Julius Caesar's reform of 46 BCE produced the Julian calendar, which kept January 1 as the year's opening date.

Then it moved. After the fifth century much of Christian Europe shifted the new year off January 1, and March 25 and December 25 both became common starting dates. Pope Gregory XIII's calendar of 1582 restored January 1; Italy, France, and Spain adopted it immediately, while Protestant and Orthodox countries took far longer. Britain and its American colonies did not switch until 1752, having kept New Year's Day on March 25 until then — which makes the January 1 holiday younger, in English-speaking America, than most of the colonies observing it.

Legal standing is younger still. Congress first established public holidays in 1870, for the District of Columbia: New Year's Day, Independence Day, Christmas, and Thanksgiving.

The two American set pieces are both promotional in origin and both well documented. Times Square got its crowd in 1904, when Adolph Ochs staged an all-day street festival with fireworks to mark the opening of The New York Times' new headquarters — he had already persuaded the city to rename Longacre Square after the paper — and more than 200,000 people came. The city banned the fireworks two years later, and in 1907 a lighted ball descended the flagpole atop One Times Square instead: iron and wood, five feet across, 700 pounds, one hundred 25-watt bulbs, built by a young immigrant metalworker named Jacob Starr. It has gone down every year since except 1942 and 1943, when New York's wartime dimout darkened the square. The ball unveiled in November 2025 is 12.5 feet across and weighs 12,350 pounds.

Pasadena's parade is older and was frank about its purpose. Members of the Valley Hunt Club, led by Charles Frederick Holder, staged the first Tournament of Roses on New Year's Day in 1890. Holder's pitch to the club was advertising copy: "In New York, people are buried in snow. Let's hold a festival to tell the world about our paradise."

How to observe

Find out when your New Year's Day off actually falls. Federal employees follow 5 U.S.C. 6103, and when January 1 lands on a Saturday the holiday is observed the preceding Friday. The federal New Year's Day for 2028 is therefore Friday, December 31, 2027.

Sing the song wrong knowingly. Robert Burns did not so much write "Auld Lang Syne" as compile it, in 1788, from older material reaching back as far as the sixteenth century. The tune was his publisher's choice and derives from a traditional Scottish folk-dance tune, possibly Sir Alexander Don's strathspey, though the Library of Congress notes the exact source is difficult to establish.

Watch the Rose Parade knowing what it was for. The Tournament of Roses began in 1890 as a winter-climate advertisement for Southern California, and the man who proposed it said so out loud at the meeting that launched it.