The new year – between pagan and Christian

The celebration of the New Year is maybe the oldest feast in the world, his origins rising since the old Babylon, now more than 2000 years before the birth of Christ. The Christians boycotted it and considered it being pagan, the day of its celebrated changed a great number of times, but through the millenniums, the celebration still exists and it is a symbol of life, of the rebirth of nature, of the victory of light over dark. And all this because time needs to be helped to flow.

For centuries, the day when the New Year began was coinciding with the day of Christmas. So, the religious feast of the birth of God was mixing up with the pagan feast of the New Year. There were the Romans who instituted the day of the first of January as the beginning of the New Year. Before that, on the entire empire, this feast was celebrated on the 25th of March.

The Christianize spread more and more on the entire surface of the Roman Empire and not only. Little by little, the feast of Christmas and that of the New Year started to mix together, to become more alike. The New Year was now celebrated by praying and refusing all kind of meals, just as a religious feast. The New Year had more days when he was celebrated, varied in time between the days of Christmas, the day Of Easter, the first of March or the 25th of March. The day of the first of January is quite recent: there are 400 years to separate us from its consecration on a large scale.

The orthodox countries were the last to accept the new feast, especially for its pagan character, without connection to the religious calendar. For more than a millennium, the Christians celebrated the New Year in the day of Christmas. In Italy, in was celebrated until the 13th century, in Russia until the reign of the Great Peter, and in Romania until the end of the 19th century. For this particular reason, in some regions, the New Year is called The Little Christmas.