COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:What’s lang syne, my dear?

I say it. You say it. We all say it: Happy New Year! But answer me this, smarty pants — why do we say it? Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem whatsoever with New Year’s. Any excuse to have a party or sit around like a sloth is just fine in my opinion. I just wonder why we do it, that’s all.

Who started the whole New Year’s thing anyway? It was the ancient Babylonians, bless their hearts — they started a lot of things as it turns out. That’s the cool thing about being an ancient civilization. Whatever you do, you’re the first to do it. You do a hanging garden, everybody wants a hanging garden.

A simple fact explains why, on a cold and otherwise meaningless winter’s night, we start yelling and cheering and kissing everyone in sight when the clock strikes 12. It’s because the Babylonians followed a different calendar. Four thousand years ago, the new year didn’t start in January. The Babylonians wouldn’t have known January from Janis Joplin. Actually they didn’t know her either. The Babylonian New Year started with the vernal equinox, a.k.a. the first day of spring.

Like all the ancients, the Babylonians were big on fertility rituals, and the first sign of green in the spring was major. It was Mother Nature’s way of saying, “I’m OK. You, you’re so-so, but I’ll give you another year anyway.” The message of renewal was not lost on the Babylonians. Their New Year’s ragers lasted 11 days, with each day having a different theme — none of which can be discussed here — and endless offerings to more gods than you can count, which is a lot of gods.

The Romans picked it up from there, still celebrating the new year in March, although they shortened the party time to a week. The Romans also gave it a twist that explains why we do what we do on New Year’s. The Roman senate kept changing the calendar for various reasons until 46 BC, when Julius Caesar said, “All right already, you make me crazy with this stuff” and declared Jan. 1 the first day of the year. That’s why it’s called the Julian calendar, by the way.

New Year’s celebrations took a serious downturn in the 2nd century when the church said they were nothing but warmed over pagan fertility rites, which they were, and banned them. As usually happens, no one paid too much attention to the ban.

They tried renaming New Year’s the Feast of Christ’s Circumcision, but it didn’t have quite the same ring as “Humongous New Year’s Bash Friday at Circus Maximus — Be There.” Through the Middle Ages, people continued to celebrate the new year in lots of ways but always with some kind of party in there somewhere.

Write this down: Whatever happens in human history, the urge to throw a party is a constant.

What about making New Year’s resolutions? Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t get it. We can’t quit whatever it is we’re trying to quit or start whatever we’re trying to start in April or August or two weeks ago, but for some reason, somehow, just because it’s Jan. 1, we’ll be able to do it.

Who started that? The Babylonians, of course.

Their version was an annual resolution to return everything they had borrowed during the year, although you wouldn’t think there would be that much stuff to loan out in 4000 BC. A donkey, some wheat, maybe a scythe, who knows.

You can thank the ancient Greeks for using the image of a baby as the new year. Their version of a New Year’s rager was a springtime celebration of Dionysus, the god of fertility and wine — an excellent choice for a party god, I think. Everyone would cheer as a baby signifying the earth’s rebirth was carried through the crowd in a basket. The image of the new year as a baby in diapers wearing a sash with the year on it started in Germany and was brought here in colonial times by immigrants.

To this day, different cultures have some interesting ideas about New Year’s. A common belief is that the new year will bring either very good luck or very bad luck, although the reasons for either one are pretty fuzzy. In some countries, people think the first visitor to step through your door in the new year is what brings good luck or bad. Having the first visitor be a tall man with dark hair is considered especially lucky. Don’t get that either. If Mickey Rooney is the first through your door, you’re doomed?

Special foods are big on New Year’s. The Dutch eat doughnuts on New Year’s for good luck, and rice and cabbage are lucky New Year’s foods around the world. In the Deep South, black-eyed peas and hog jowls or ham are considered can’t-miss, good-luck foods on the big day.

Finally, I think it’s very appropriate that since we usher in the new year with customs we don’t remember, we do it while singing a song that we don’t understand — “Auld Lang Syne.” Know what it means? Not to worry. Neither does anyone else.

In Scottish dialect, “auld” means “old” and “lang syne” means “long ago.” Literally, “auld lang syne” means “the old long ago,” but it’s an expression for “the good old days.” So the first line, “Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?” means, “Should we forget about our old friends?” The second line, “Should auld acquaintance be forgot and days of auld lang syne?” means, “Should we forget about our old friends and the good old days?”

Can you get this kind of information anywhere else? I don’t see how.

“Auld Lang Syne” has been a New Year’s staple in this country since 1929, when bandleader Guy Lombardo played it in his New Year’s Eve broadcast from the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan. Life magazine once predicted that “if Lombardo ever failed to play ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ the American public would not believe that the new year had really arrived.” That prediction proved incorrect.

So there you have it. Everything you need to know about New Year’s, black-eyed peas, Dionysus and “Auld Lang Syne,” sort of.

Most important lesson of all — just because we don’t understand something doesn’t mean we can’t have a party in honor of it. Happy New Year.

I gotta go.