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| New Year celebrations are known in the late Swedish peasant society as well as in our time. They waked in the new year and fired shots with rifles. If you wanted to know how the coming year would turn out, this was a good time to predict it. |
Celebrating the new year is something most people do.
The celebration at midnight is the first calendar party of the year. New Year's Eve is named after Sylvester after Pope Silvester, who died on December 31, 335. In traditions outside the West and at different times in history, as is well known, the new year is placed at other times. In Sweden, December 25 was New Year's Day until the 16th century, but was celebrated in some places until the 18th century.
Just like Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve was charged with magical power. Then it was appropriate to predict how the coming year would turn out in terms of harvest, marriage and possible deaths. The young girl who wanted to see into the future would bow three times for the new moon and read a verse of the following wording:
Good day, New Years new
Tell me whose bread I'll bake
Whose bed am I going to make?
Whose child am I going to give birth to?
(from "The Great Christmas Book" by Jan-Öjwind Swahn)
From Västergötland are told about girls who went out at 12 o'clock (midnight) and swept a small distance from the front stairs to the yard. The next day the intended fiance would come to the farm.
The techniques for telling fortunes were many, but telling fortunes in coffee grounds or tin was often used. From Småland is told about the farmer who interpreted the New Year's (the new moon) so that as many days as the New Year's were hidden by clouds, as many days the grain would lie in the ground.
Wake for the new year
A wake for the New Year is a late tradition and a bourgeois phenomenon which over time has spread to all classes of society. The New Year's ring, which in our time has taken on such a large role, was spread via radio from the 1920s. However, there was a New Year's ring at Skansen as early as 1893, on the initiative of Artur Hazelius.
During the post-war period, the New Year celebrations have grown and increasingly received luxury emphasis. The model is high-class parties from the past. Food and clothing play a big role at New Year's. We like to dress up, drink sparkling wine and eat exclusive food. In Västra Vingåker parish in Södermanland, the young people wished each other a happy new year after the morning's church visit with the following words:
I wish you a happy new year
That you get a beautiful fiancée
I wish you a happy new year
That you get a beautiful fiancé
For dinner it was then pork roast with brown beans and for dessert fruit soup. For supper fish and porridge left over from New Year's Eve.
Unlike Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve is a more public celebration. Family is not at the center as much as friends and our social networks. Celebrating New Year with bangs and fireworks goes back to the custom of kicking off the new year with shots. New Year's greetings - congratulations - have been known since 15th century Germany.
Weather signs and happiness
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| New Year's card depicting a love couple, a man and a woman tenderly holding each other. They stand outdoors in a wintry landscape dressed in elegant clothes from the 1910s cut. An angel with halo and pink ankle-clad clothing keeps his hands protective above them. The text "Happy New Year" in gold print in the lower corner. |
New Year's Eve, like Christmas Eve, was a time to make predictions about the coming year. “Dear New Year's New! Whose shirt should I sew, whose cake should I bake, whose wife should I become? ”, Is a rhyme that helps the young girls to predict who will be the beloved. The game philippine, where the person who first utters "philippine" when seen after the new year may wish for something, can be said to be a remnant of these predictions.
In our time, many make a New Year's promise in connection with the stroke of midnight. The tradition comes from the United States, where people talk about New Year's resolutions. The word New Year's promise began to be used in the 1940s, but the phenomenon was known under other names as early as the 20th century in Sweden. In the peasant society, the custom of making New Year's vows was unknown.
Happy new year everyone!
//Daniel
