New Year madness

A bit of a cold shower from the party poopers at The Wall Street Journal:

New Year madness is a thing of quite modern making, and hardly an improvement on the tradition that long preceded it, which called for a somewhat sober, respectful and reflective morning celebration. I blame the Scots for the worldwide embrace of midnight debauchery. And, of course, whoever it was that, some little while beforehand, went and invented public clocks.

Clocks are the real key. The whole notion of bidding formal and raucous farewell to the Old and offering optimistic greeting to the New was something that could really only occur once we in the public square knew when the exact moment of midnight was. Until the manufacture of proper clock escapements, and until Galileo exhibited the marvels of the pendulum, the slow appearance of dawn just had to do. First light was the only clue anyone had as to the start of a new year.

But then came clocks, at first great clanking iron engines equipped with enormous hanging bells that could inform us of the passing of time. Clocks that could perform this magic were first placed on top of specially-built church towers—initially to wake the villagers from slumber, to bring the harvest-workers home from the fields, or to sound the Angelus and bring in the pious to pray.

Reuters

New Year's fireworks in Berlin.

These devices first began to peal their chimes in the 15th century, and they had become popular and quite widely dispersed by the 17th. All towns had them by then, as did most villages—and it was about this time that the Scots, armed with timepieces of their own, enthusiastically got into the act.

They adopted in short order their peculiar twin customs of Hogmanay and First Footing, designed to mark the sliding of one year into another, and by the 1680s they started organizing celebrations around them that eventually had us all getting off on this whole present-day New-Year-begins-at-midnight malarkey. Then a century later Robert Burns wrote the words to "Auld Lang Syne" and set it to a jaunty Scottish dance tune—and with that, and the provision on the last evening of December of copious draughts of whisky, so these normally dour and repressed northern peoples oversaw the beginning of the long decline of the old habit of marking New Year with ceremonies of dignified moderation and temporal respect.