We are hardly a week or so old in 2019. It is however intriguing that almost 70% of friends, relatives and associates are keen to know what “your New year resolutions” are!
This has in a way become part of the greetings, only second to happy New Year or “Mukulike Omwaka”, in one of the local languages.
At night services, many Christians prepare for the year ahead by praying and making these resolutions. The preparations by the priests actually begin as early as November, preparing believers for the New Year, giving them hope and focusing them to the coming year. Many playgrounds and stadiums have been taken over by different Pentecostal and other religious denominations who seek God while praising and praying all night through to the morning of first January each year.
The Nile Wires now traces the origins of the concept of New Year resolution. According to Ancient Origins Magazine of 1st January 2014, A New Year’s resolution is a tradition, most common in the western world but also found in the Eastern, in which a person resolves to change an undesired trait or behavior, to accomplish a personal goal or otherwise improve their life.
It is further noted that the concept has religious connotations especially among the Babylonians.
Who made promises to their gods at the start of each year that they would return borrowed objects and pay their debts .
In the medieval era, the knights took the “peacock vow” at the end of the Christmas season each year to re-affirm their commitment to chivalry.
This tradition has many other religious parallels. During Judaism’s New Year, Rosh Hashanah, through the High holidays and culminating in Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), one is to reflect upon one’s wrongdoings over the year and both seek and offer forgiveness. People can act similarly during the Christian liturgical season of Lent, although the motive behind this holiday is more of sacrifice than of responsibility. In fact, the Methodist practice of New Year’s resolutions came, in part, from the Lenten sacrifices. The concept, regardless of creed, is to reflect upon self-improvement annually.
In Africa, it is traced to the ancient Egyptians who would make sacrifices to Hapi, the god of the Nile, at the beginning of their year in July, a time when the Nile’s annual flood would usher in a particularly fertile period. In return for sacrifice and worship they might request good fortune, rich harvests and military successes.
According to the Economist January 5th 2018, The Romans continued the habit, but also changed the date. The Roman year originally had ten months, starting in March around the spring equinox, plus another 60-odd winter days that were not included in the named months.
Around 700BC, two more months were added, but it was not until 46BC, when Julius Caesar proposed a reformed calendar, that January was officially established as the beginning of the year. Since this was the date on which the city’s newly elected consuls began their tenure, it marked a shift in calendric emphasis from agrarian cycles to civil rotations.
Roman new-year festivities included the worship of Janus, the god of beginnings and endings, after whom the month of January is named. But their pagan legacy annoyed Christians, and in medieval Europe some attempts were made to celebrate the new year on dates of religious significance, such as Christmas, or the Feast of the Annunciation in March. Resolutions also changed. Prayer vigils and confessions were used to pledge allegiance to a set of religious values. At the end of the Christmas feasts, some knights were said to have taken an oath known as “The Vow of the Peacock”, in which they placed their hands on a peacock (a bird considered noble) in order to renew their commitment to chivalry. This moral flavour to the pledges persisted. A 17th-century Scotswoman wrote in her diary of taking Biblical verses as starting points for resolutions (“I will not offend anymore”).
By the time the phrase “new-year resolutions” first appeared, in a Boston newspaper in 1813, the pledges were losing their religious gravitas. An article published a few years earlier in Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, or, Compendium of Entertaining Knowledge, an Irish publication, satirises the practice. It states that physicians had solemnly pledged to “be very moderate in their fees” and statesmen to “have no other object in view than the good of their country”. Yet the making of unrealistic pledges has remained a tradition. According to polls, around half the population of Britain and America now make resolutions—though fewer than 10% keep them. Fear of divine retribution might have been a useful thing.
In Uganda the tradition has gained relevance especially to the elite class, and many Christians and Muslim alike have taken it up as a way of visualizing the future, and taking stalk of their past achievements over the years.
