The History of New Year Celebrations

 

Welcome to my latest blog post. This week I will continue in the festive spirit and focus on the history of New Year celebrations. For once I couldn’t find anything disability related, so you will have to come back next week for some disability action.

How Old are New Year Celebrations?

The concept of a new year always puzzles me. I mean, it’s not like there is any difference in the world on 1st January compared to 31st December. You may be surprised to learn that the New Year has been celebrated for almost as long as civilisation has existed. There are recorded celebrations of the New Year in ancient Babylon 4,000 years ago. Their celebration did not take place on 31st December-1st January as it does in several countries today. Instead, they held the 11-day festival of Atiku starting on the first new moon after the vernal equinox. This is the day with equal light and darkness, usually in late March. During this festival, a different ritual was performed on each day, and the king was chosen for the following year. This usually just meant that the sitting king had his divine mandate symbolically renewed.

For a long time, civilisations used astronomical or agricultural events to start the new year. This was true of the early Romans who also used the vernal equinox as their start date. Romulus was credited with creating this calendar which consisted of 10 months and 304 days. A later king, Numa Pompilius, came along and messed the whole thing up by adding the months Januarius and Februarius. This meant that over time, the calendar became out of sync with the sun and it was confusing for a while. However, Julius Caesar saved the day in 46 B.C.E. He consulted with his best astronomers and mathematicians and created the Julian calendar. As part of this manipulation of time, he moved the first day of the year to 1st January. This was partly to honour the god who the month is named after, Janus, the god of openings and beginnings. Janus was an interesting god as he had two faces, one facing forward and the other backwards. This allowed him to simultaneously see into the past and the future. The perfect god for New Year I would think, as we reflect on the previous 12 months and look forward to the year to come!

However, this was not the last calendar change. You see, there was a teensy tiny little problem with the Julian calendar calculations. They calculated the solar year as 365.25 days, when everybody knows it is actually 365.242199 days. And they call themselves mathematicians! This added an extra 11 minutes per year, which meant that in the year 1000, New Year was actually 7th January. Eventually, the Catholic Church stepped in and decided to put an end to the time changing shenanigans…. by changing the time. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII baptised the new calendar which most countries still use today. Not everybody celebrates the new year on 1st January though. For instance, the Chinese New Year is celebrated on the second new moon after the winter solstice.       

Modern New Year Traditions

The New Year is celebrated in different ways depending on what part of the world you live in. In the English-speaking world, it is common to sing “Auld Lang Syne”, a Scottish poem written by Robert Burns in 1788. The melody for the song is said to come from a much older Scottish folk song. In many parts of the world rituals and customs are performed to ensure good fortune for the year to come. In many Spanish speaking countries, including Spain, people bolt down a dozen grapes, symbolizing their hopes for the year ahead. The food served on New Year’s Eve is also important. For some cultures, pigs represent prosperity and therefore pork is consumed in countries including Austria, Cuba, Hungary and Portugal. In some parts of the world, people eat food that resembles the shape of money. It is hoped that this will bring financial success. For instance, in the southern United States, they eat black-eyed peas, while in Italy, lentils are the foodstuff of choice.

I think it is fair to say that New Year celebrations have a long a varied history.

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Next week I will look at the history of the evil eye, focusing on what the Greeks and Romans believed about it.

                                                                                    Happy New Year!

                                                                                   The Wheelchair Historian

Further Reading

EarthSky, ‘Why does the new year begin on January 1?’, January 1, 2016 https://earthsky.org/earth/why-does-the-new-year-begin-on-january-1 Accessed: 1 January 2021.

Ghose, Tia, ‘Here's How 10 New Year's Eve Traditions Got Started’, December 30, 2017 https://www.livescience.com/57344-the-origin-of-7-new-years-traditions-revealed.html Accessed: 1 January 2021.

History.com Editors, ‘New Year’s’, HISTORY, Last Updated: June 7, 2019, Original Published Date: February 16, 2010 https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/new-years Accessed: December 15, 2020.

Jeon, Hannah, ‘Why Do We Celebrate New Year's Day? A Fascinating Look Into New Year's History’, Dec 14, 2020 https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/holidays/a29787120/new-years-history/ Accessed: 1 January 2021.

Rix-Standing, Luke, ‘A brief history of New Year, one of the few festivals that's universally celebrated’, 31 December, 2019 01:00 https://www.irishnews.com/lifestyle/2019/12/31/news/a-brief-history-of-new-year-one-of-the-few-festivals-that-s-universally-celebrated-1800476/ Accessed: 1 January 2021.

Tilford, Julia, ‘How did New Year's eve start? The history and tradition explained’, Dec. 28, 2016 https://www.mic.com/articles/163481/how-did-new-year-s-eve-start-the-history-and-tradition-explained Accessed: 1 January 2021.

Tiny Tim's Troublesome Tale

 

Welcome to my special Christmas post. It took me a while to decide what I should write about. I wanted it to be festive, but also be a history post with a disability aspect. As you are probably aware, the history of disability and Christmas cheer don’t really go hand in hand. The only thing I could think of that I could put a positive spin on was Tiny Tim from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843). When I initially looked up Tiny Tim online, I came across the singer by that name. While fascinating, he was not the person I was looking for, so I carried on my search. Anyway, what follows is what I was able to cobble together in an attempt to make a usually bleak subject Christmassy and magical!!

 

What the Dickens?

I must admit that I know rather little about Charles Dickens. You may remember from my post on Zip the Pinhead, that Dickens was the one who gave Barnum the idea to call Zip, ‘What is it?’. This gave me the impression that Dickens, much like many of his 19^th century counterparts did not actually care about disabled people and either feared or pitied them. This may not have been the case. Perhaps the reason that Dickens attended one of Barnum’s exhibits was because he had a keen interest in human illness.

Tiny Tim is possibly the best-known disabled child in the works of Dickens, but he was not the only one. In 1845, Dickens published A Cricket on the Hearth, in which one of the characters, Bertha, is blind. She is the daughter of an employee of a prideful toy merchant. I am starting to think that Dickens liked to repeat the same stories and hoped that nobody would notice. Much like Tiny Tim, Bertha is a happy child, even though she is expected to be miserable due to her disability. It seems as though Dickens is saying being/becoming disabled is not the worst thing in the world, which even today is a common belief about disability.

Perhaps Dickens had a better understanding of disability and illness than he is given credit for. When Dickens was 12, his father was put in debtors’ prison, meaning that young Charles lived in poverty for a while. He also had personal experience of disability and ill health as he had epilepsy and his nephew died of tuberculosis at a young age. This may be where his character of Tiny Tim came from. Dickens was also incredibly skilled at identifying disease. In many of his works, he would accurately describe the symptoms of various illnesses that had not been identified yet. I think it is safe to say that Charles Dickens knew what he was talking about when he included the disabled Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol.

 

What was Troubling Tiny Tim?

I know it is a fictional story that is over 150 years old, but it is still interesting to speculate what illness may have been afflicting Tiny Tim. It is important to note that whatever the problem was, his situation dramatically improved once Scrooge had a change of heart after being scared witless by some ghosts. It would have to be an illness that could be improved with money, but would prove fatal if neglected. Ah…. Death, that’s what you want to read about at Christmas time. Here is what we know about his problem. According to the book, Tiny Tim “bore a little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame.” He is also carried on the back of his father from the Christmas service to his home. Oh…. and he was small in stature, hence the adjective Tiny in his name.

There are several conditions which may explain Tiny Tim’s symptoms. Firstly, there is possibly the most obvious explanation. As A Christmas Carol is a book of fiction, Tiny Tim’s illness may be a metaphor for the ills of society in general. I like this explanation as I am fond of a good metaphor. However, as I am more interested in Tiny Tim’s illness, I will ignore the logical answer. One possible diagnosis is Renal Tubular Acidosis. This is a disease that affects the kidneys. It can lead to restricted growth, bone disease as well as a whole host of other issues. It is incredibly rare, so is an unlikely diagnosis, but was believed to be one of the conditions that Charles II of Spain was cursed with, as discussed a few months ago. Other conditions put forward over the years include polio and cerebral palsy. However, an increase in wealth and a better diet would be unlikely to dramatically change Tiny Tim’s fortunes if either of these were the cause.

Tuberculosis is a more probably explanation, as nearly 50% of children in London at this time had the disease, including the nephew of Charles Dickens as mentioned before. While it may have been difficult to treat back then, an improved diet and more sun exposure, provided by trips to a sanatorium may have helped. Another likely disease was rickets. This could be dealt with easily enough by an improved diet. Some people have pointed out that if a poor diet was the cause, then all the Cratchit children should have had rickets. However, as Tiny Tim was the youngest, his meals would have been the poorest quality. Given the evidence that we have to go on, a combination of rickets and TB is most likely.

 

Festive Cheer?

Okay. At the start of this post, I said I would try and do three things. 1. Talk about history, which I think I have done. 2. Talk about disability, which I think I have managed by haphazardly trying to diagnose a fictional character. 3. I said I would make it Christmassy, whatever that means. Let’s give that a go, shall we? Since his conception, Tiny Tim has become a poster boy for charities dealing with disability. He is the sweet little kid that makes everyone feel pity for him and empty their pockets, which works well at Christmas because everyone is in a giving mood. Some disabled people don’t like this as they rightly don’t want to be pitied. But hey, if it means people are kinder to each other, I’m all for it!

Fun Fact (I think it’s fun anyway): You may be aware of the phrase ‘Bah humbug’ from A Christmas Carol, but did you know that saying ‘Merry Christmas’ originated from this work as well!

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Next week I will have a New Year special. I just need to work out what it will be.

 

                                                                                                Merry Christmas!!

                                               

                                                                                   The Wheelchair Historian

 

Further Reading

Chesney, RW. Environmental Factors in Tiny Tim's Near-Fatal Illness. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2012;166(3):271–275. doi:10.1001/archpediatrics.2011.852 Accessed: 22^nd December, 2020.

Hingston, Kylee-Anne, “A Christmas Carol,” Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures & Contexts, https://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/items/show/28 Accessed: December 22, 2020.

Kudlick, Catherine, ‘#Disabled People to the Rescue: A Christmas Carol’ https://longmoreinstitute.sfsu.edu/disabled-people-rescue-christmas-carol Accessed: 22^nd December, 2020.

Palik, Jennifer, ‘What was wrong with Tiny Tim in 'A Christmas Carol'?’ Updated Jan 05, 2019; Posted Dec 25, 2011 https://www.pennlive.com/bodyandmind/2011/12/a_big_mystery_surrounding_tiny.html Accessed: 22^nd December, 2020.

Soehnlin, Jenn, ‘What Charles Dickens Teaches Us About Disability in His Christmas Novellas’, Sunday, December 15, 2019 https://embracing.life/article/what-charles-dickens-teaches-us-about-disability-in-his-christmas-novellas Accessed: 22^nd December, 2020.

The History of Halloween

 

 

This week I will be discussing Halloween, because…. well…. it is Halloween. You may be wondering what the history of Halloween has to do with disability. To be honest, I’m not so sure myself. Hopefully by the time I have finished writing this I will have thought of a connection. Let us begin shall we? Muahaha!

 

Ancient Halloween

What we now know as Halloween began as a Celtic festival 2,000 years ago. The Celts lived in Ireland, Britain, and Northern France at that time (It’s a bit more complicated than that, but for our purposes, this will suffice). In their calendar, 1^st November was the start of the new year. As such, they celebrated the festival of Samhain (a Gaelic word pronounced “sow-win”), from 31^st October to 1^st November.

There were some very interesting beliefs surrounding the event. For instance, it was thought that for that one day of the year, the souls of the dead would visit their relatives. This is because the barrier between the realms of the living and the dead had been removed. This also allowed for the souls of the deceased of the previous 12 months to pass over to the Otherworld. This all seems fairly pleasant, but the souls of the dead were not the only things that travelled between the two realms. Evil spirits and demons also made their way across to torment the living. I suppose that’s what happens when the gates of hell open. In order to combat this, Druids would light huge hilltop fires and people would disguise themselves as evil spirits, so that the actual evil spirits would leave them alone. Sound familiar? I could go on and on about Samhain and the Celts, but I still have to work my way up to the present day AND make something up about…. sorry, I mean tell you about how Halloween relates to disability.

 

Modern(ish) Halloween

So. How did we get from a Celtic harvest festival 2,000 years ago, to trick-or-treating and horror movies etc.? I will attempt to sum up 2,000 years in the space of a few short paragraphs.

Side note: It has just dawned on me that some readers may be mispronouncing the word Celtic. The ancient people discussed above are Celts (pronounced Kellt, like the name Kelly). Anything related to them is Celtic (pronounced Kell-tick). The basketball team, the Boston Celtics and the Scottish football team, Glasgow Celtic, are both pronounced Cell-tick. I have no idea why.

Anyway, in the 7^th century CE Pope Boniface IV established All Saints’ Day, to be held on 13^th May to honour saints and martyrs. A century later, when the pagan tradition of lighting hilltop fires etc. still continued, Pope Gregory III decided to move All Saints’ Day to 1^st November in order to quash the pagan ritual. All Souls’ Day was also incorporated into the same period. This is where the name Halloween comes from. An alternative name for All Saints’ Day is All Hallows’ Day. This made the previous day All Hallow’s Eve. Over time this was shortened to the Halloween we know and (some of us) love today.

As you may have guessed, usurping Samhain and making it Christian didn’t do much to change the Celtic aspects of it. In fact, the church kept the aspects such as bonfires and dressing as demons, giving them Christian connotations. It is believed that trick-or-treating had its origins in early All Souls’ Day celebrations. Children would go door to door and would receive a ‘soul cake’ in return for praying for the occupant’s dead relatives.

After the Reformation, Halloween lost most of its religious meaning. The customs of Halloween were brought to America mostly by Irish immigrants after the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. At first it was seen as a community celebration. However, in the early decades of the 20^th Century there were problems with vandalism. People were taking the trick part of trick-or-treating too seriously, and the treats were almost like a bribe to prevent damage.

As you can probably tell, there is way more to the history of Halloween than what I have mentioned here. If you want to know more, you can check out some of the articles I have listed under further reading.

Bonfire celebration, Scotland

 

Don’t Be Disabled

Ah. We have reached the point where I promised I would tell you how Halloween relates to disability. Simply put, if you are not disabled, your Halloween costume should not include a disability. Before I started to research this, it never occurred to me that disabled Halloween costumes were offensive. There are several examples I came across. This is one I made up on the spot. Say, for instance, as an able-bodied person you decide to dress as a wheelchair user for Halloween. The problem with that is that you can sit into a wheelchair for the night, pretend to be disabled and then stand up and walk off. People who need to use a wheelchair don’t have this option. There are also stories of disabled people being ignored or mistreated around Halloween as people assume they are just in costume. Another issue is haunted houses, particularly those with an asylum theme. To put it mildly, historically, asylums and institutions for the disabled were horrific places. They should not be used for entertainment purposes.

Wow. That was dark. Happy Halloween Everybody!!

To keep up to date with my latest blog posts, you can like my Facebook page, or follow me on Twitter. You can find them by clicking the relevant icons in the sidebar.

Next week, I will be returning to the world of the freak show by looking at P.T. Barnum in more detail.

 

                                                                                                     The Wheelchair Historian  

 

Further Reading

Herbert, Niamh, ‘My Disability is Not a Costume’, Nov 2, 2017 http://www.universitytimes.ie/2017/11/my-disability-is-not-a-costume/ Accessed: 30 October, 2020.

History.com Editors, ‘Halloween 2020’, Last Updated: October 6, 2020, Original Published: November 18, 2009 https://www.history.com/topics/halloween/history-of-halloween Accessed: 12 October, 2020.

History.com Editors, ‘Samhain’ Last Updated: October 31, 2019, Original Published Date: April 6, 2018 https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/samhain Accessed: 14 October, 2020.

Leary, Alaina, ‘Disability Isn’t a Halloween Costume’ Wednesday, October 17, 2018 https://rootedinrights.org/disability-isnt-a-halloween-costume/ Accessed: 30 October, 2020.

McNamara, Brittney, ‘Why It's Not OK to Dress Up as Someone With a Disability for Halloween’, October 15, 2018 https://www.teenvogue.com/story/not-ok-to-dress-up-as-someone-with-a-disability-for-halloween Accessed: 30 October, 2020.

Smith Beitiks, Emily, ‘Disability History Gets Forgotten Each Halloween’, San Francisco State University, Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability https://longmoreinstitute.sfsu.edu/disability-history-gets-forgotten-each-halloween Accessed: 30 October, 2020.

Smith Beitiks, Emily, and Conroy, James W., ‘Haunted Pennhurst attraction the 'final indignity'’, November 12, 2011 https://longmoreinstitute.sfsu.edu/disability-history-gets-forgotten-each-halloween Accessed: 30 October, 2020.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Halloween’, Last Updated: Aug 31, 2020 https://www.britannica.com/topic/Halloween#:~:text=Halloween%20had%20its%20origins%20in%20the%20festival%20of,calendars%2C%20the%20new%20year%20was%20believed%20to%20begin Accessed: 30, October 2020.