Dubious Collection of New Years
Throughout this Year of Years, I have personally only experienced four of the New Years: last Dec 31st, Chinese New Year, Jewish New Year and the english tax year - which was admittedly only momentarily exciting because I could mention it here. All the other New Years I’ve covered will most likely have been celebrated somewhere by someone, but my experience was second hand and, essentially, via the internet. This has been a project of epic travel around the world from the comfort of my sofa.
I’m well aware along the way I will have relied on inaccurate sources at times. I tried not to be presumptuous of my research, but I’m sure I’ve made mistakes. However I have also made choices to not include information too. And in particular, where I discovered scant information about New Years that I just didn’t feel justified in sharing definitively. These tended to be aboriginal customs from indigenous peoples across Australia, and North America, of which it would be great to know more, but these single quotes or repeated phrases just didn’t feel reliable enough at the time. Here is a quick round up of some of the ones I didn’t include:
Murador New Year - claimed as 30 October, of a Western Australian aboriginal tribe I couldn’t find any more information on.
Midewiwin supposedly celebrate(d) new year in the winter, and Waabanowin have a new year in the spring time called Minookamin. Midewiwin is also known as the Grand Medicine Society, Waabanowin as teh Dawn Society. Both are Native American secretive and animistic religions, and as such the information is scarce, or based on what feel like bad western undertsandings, so I didnt feel comfortable including these.
I also found a long description in one article penned by Barry Fiore, whose has a radio programme and website called Tower of Song, a blog under his moniker the Gypsy Scholar. Its all fascinating, and his page about the Native American New Years sounds authoritative. But as I could find no other sources, I left it in his hands. I’m not debunking his statements, I just don’t want o parrot one single source without any other evidence in a half-arsed fashion. Which doesn’t mean there weren’t New Years celebrated - and I send out wishes now across the time space continuum to all who celebrated these, and to Barry.
There also may well have been other New Years I missed in my internet-reliant sofa-world research. And who knows. This turn of the earth may be almost done, but I’m not sure I am with this project….
