Happy New Year!
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Seeing in the New Year seems to be one of our best loved and most popular public holidays, marked with breath-taking firework displays as the stroke of midnight enters different time zones around the world.

It seems the most natural thing in the world to usher in the New Year with festivity and merriment. Yet I always wondered why the evening prior was considered more important than the actual day itself. Considering that our ancient ancestors began their day at sunset, it seemed a distinctly pagan thing to do, and so naturally, I wondered about its origins.

It seems the earliest people to celebrate new year were the Mesopotamians of Babylon, in what is now known as Iraq, around 2000BC, only it wasn’t in January, but in mid-March at the time of the vernal equinox (when day and night are of equal length; vernal denotes Spring.).