January 2023

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NEW YEAR

We have our rituals every new year – lose weight, spend more time with the family, be attentive to our moral compass, etc. The list goes on, but where did all of this begin?

It is more fact than fable and is believed that 4,000 years ago, the Babylonians instituted resolutions to open the new year. However, it had nothing to do with our January calendar. With our Gregorian calendar, their New Year celebration occurred in mid-March to coincide with planting season.


 

We typically begin our celebration in the afternoon or evening of the day before the new year rolls in. Our New Years' festivities often include a football game, joining friends and family, or a million people we have never met, for dinner and drinks, dancing, games, hoopla, and maybe a morning-after headache and nausea.

The first day of the new year continues our commemoration, often with a parade and more ball games, eating, and drinking. Yes, and again a headache or nausea.

 


Nevertheless, on the second day of the new year, we kick-start ourselves into the daily routine of the year gone by and, hopefully, practice those resolutions we so thoughtfully proposed.

For our predecessors, though, it wasn't over in those few hours we drank, ate, and partied. Babylonians held a 12-day religious festival known as Akita, honoring their deity, Marduk. During the festival, they crowned a new king or reaffirmed their fidelity to the current king. (For us, it is a new president and congress or a re-affirmation of the current office holders.)

An essential part of their festival, and probably the forerunner of our "resolutions," was their promise to pay their debts and to return anything they had borrowed.

However, there is a big difference between their "resolutions" and ours. If they fulfilled their resolutions, their pagan gods would bestow favor on them. Otherwise, those same gods would hold them in a disservice, a burden no one wanted to carry.

Whether old or new, a resolution will only come to pass if we believe in it and put our effort forward to carry it out. Mine? Publish "The Third Dawn—Redux." It will happen. I will work on it and not give up until I see the book in print.

Until then, enjoy my previously published books at Amazon, or for personalized copies, go to my bookstore at www.thomasjnichols.com/. Relax with the Border War Series of drug and human trafficking or the Christie Cole Trilogy for international espionage and mystery.






 

Let January 2023 be the time of your epiphany. Be happy, live happily, and enjoy life. Have a fabulous year.

 

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