I have always found the way New Year’s Day is celebrated in the American south interesting, if not embraceable. In this region it is traditional to have a meal of hog jowls, Hoppin’ John, and turnip or collard greens. The pork is a sign of prosperity, the black-eyed peas in the Hoppin’ John represent coins, and the greens represent folding money. They would never serve chicken, because chickens scratch backwards and having wings could let your luck fly away.

I enjoy New Year’s the way we celebrate it, even though we don’t have hog jowls and Hoppin’ John; we usually celebrate it by watching the Rose Bowl Parade, watching some football, and having a special meal. Since it comes from the arbitrary start day of our calendar, I can’t help thinking of it as an accidental, or at least random, holiday. Indeed, while New Year’s is celebrated all over the world and in many cultures, it comes on different days (relative to our calendar) due to adherence to different calendars. I guess we’re fortunate (in many ways) that we don’t live on Neptune; since a year there is 165 of our years, you’d be lucky to ever celebrate the holiday.

There’s something about New Year’s that makes it a popular holiday everywhere; it is the major holiday of the year for the Chinese. Like us, these cultures also have many interesting New Year’s traditions. I think the reason for this popularity is that it represents a new start, a new beginning, a do over, or even a rebirth. This is realized in our tradition of making New Year’s resolutions and is symbolized in our cartoons which portray the outgoing year as an old man and the New Year as a baby.

New Year’s doesn’t have a Biblical origin like Christmas or Easter, but the Jews of the Old Testament did celebrate a day that they viewed as the beginning of a new year. In Numbers 29:1 they were told to do no work on that day and to sound their trumpets. For them it was a day of being thankful to God for His goodness. It has been a Jewish tradition for it to be a day of forgiveness- both to give and seek. This is also appropriate for us as Christians, and we should celebrate this yearly opportunity for a restart, redo and rebirth. It is a time to be for us like the Old Testament Jews to be thankful to God and thank Him for His gift, the gift of salvation. In a conversation with Nicodemus Jesus even describes this as being “born again.”

To learn about what Jesus said to Nicodemus, read John 3:1-21, and remember that God loves YOU unconditionally.

Jim