Column from December 31, 2009

Ringing in the New Year

I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions. There’s too much of a chance for failure.

It is believed the Babylonians were the first to make New Year’s resolutions and people all over the world have been breaking them ever since. The early Christians believed the first day of the new year should be spent on reflecting on past mistakes and resolving to improve oneself.

I often set goals … things I want to reach on a personal level. They can be anything from certain books I want to read to a craft project I want to finish to writing objectives I plan to accomplish.

Those goals sound to me like they fit in with the beliefs of the early Christians.

There is quite a story behind how the world came to celebrate the new year on Jan. 1. In fact, it’s a relatively new phenomenon.

The earliest recording of a new year celebration is believed to have been in Mesopotamia around 2000 B.C. and was celebrated in mid-March, the time of the vernal equinox. Other dates were used by various ancient cultures. For example, the Egyptians, Phoenicians and Persians began their new year with the fall equinox and the Greeks celebrated on the winter solstice.

The month of January didn’t even exist until 700 B.C. That’s when the new year was moved from March to January. But this new date was not always strictly or widely observed.

In 46 B.C., Julius Caesar introduced a new solar-based calendar, which was a new lunar system that became wildly inaccurate over the years. That calendar decreed that the new year would start Jan. 1 and that date became the consistently observed New Year’s Day.

However, the celebrations were considered pagan and unchristian-like, so in 567, the Council of Tours abolished Jan. 1 as the beginning of the year.

It was restored in 1582 with the reformation of the Gregorian calendar, which is the one we use today.

As the famous New Year ball drops in Times Square, New York City, tonight, will you be watching the TV and thinking about what you’d like to do this coming year?

The tradition of dropping the ball began in 1907. The original ball was made of iron and wood.

This year’s ball is a 12-foot geodesic sphere, double the size of previous balls, and weighs 11,875 pounds. Covered in 2,668 Waterford crystals and powered by 32, 256 Philips Luxeon Rebel LEDS, the new ball is capable of creating a palette of more than 16 million colors and billions of patterns, producing a kaleidoscope of effect atop One Times Square.

In the south, cornbread is a traditional food on the New Year’s table because it is considered lucky. The color represents gold and the sweetness is said to being good luck in the coming year.

I’m not superstitious, but anything that might help with achieving any goals I set sounds good to me.

Cornbread

1-1/2 cups yellow cornmeal

1 tablespoon sugar

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 eggs

1-3/4 cups buttermilk

1/2 stick butter

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Cornbread cooks best in a cast iron pan. If you decide to try using that method, place a 10-inch cast iron pan in the oven to preheat.

The other option is to use a 9-by-9 baking dish. Lightly grease the dish, but don’t preheat it.

Mix together cornmeal, sugar, baking soda and salt.

Melt the butter and let it cool. Mix together the buttermilk, eggs and melted butter. Mix the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients.

Carefully remove the pan from the oven. Pour the batter into the pan and spread evenly. Place the pan back into the oven and bake 20 to 25 minutes.

Turn the cornbread out onto a rack to cool.