Happy New Year Stake

New Year's Day has not always been in January.

For most of English history the year turned on the 25th of March — Lady Day, the old quarter day, near enough the spring equinox. That held in Britain and its American colonies until Parliament changed it. So 1751 was a peculiar year on this side of the ocean: it began in March and ended in December, and ran only about ten months before 1752 came in on the first of January.

The following September they took eleven days out of the calendar to square up with the rest of Europe. People went to bed on the second and woke on the fourteenth.

All of which is to say the date is an agreement, not a fact of nature. What makes it work is that everyone keeps it at once.

The song is younger than most assume, and only partly Burns's. He sent "Auld Lang Syne" to a collector of Scottish airs in 1788 with a note saying he had taken it down from an old man singing — he was preserving it more than writing it. It became an American midnight fixture because Guy Lombardo played it at the top of the hour on the radio, year after year, starting in 1929.

We had this one cut as a banner strung from a branch. Hang it a few days before, leave it up a few days after. It is a good thing to walk under.

Set it where people pass — over the walk, on the tree at the drive, above the door.

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