The world's favourite New Year

By Stephen Cviic BBC News

India is happy to join in the 1 January celebrations

For most of the world, the transition from 31 December into 1 January marks the passing of one year and the beginning of another.

It is also a time of celebration, with people gathering in public places to make merry around the chimes of midnight.

The timing of the event is based around the Christian, Gregorian calendar, which was established in Europe in the 16th century.

Yet despite its widespread adoption around the world, the Western calendar is not quite universal, and some societies have maintained alternative New Year celebrations at other times.

The month of January - like all the others in the Western calendar - was invented by the Romans, who were also the first people to fix its beginning as the start of the New Year.

But for centuries afterwards, people in Europe tended to celebrate new year at a more logical seasonal time - in the spring.

It was a 16th-century Pope, Gregory the 30th, who brought the Roman months into line with the latest scientific knowledge, firmly re-establishing 1 January as New Year's Day.

In Catholic and Protestant countries, it took just under a century for this new calendar to be fully accepted, while in Orthodox Russia it was not introduced until 1918.

Hard partying

Ironically, in today's Russia, New Year's Eve is the biggest festival of the year, marked by hard partying and hard drinking.

Perhaps, surprisingly, the same is true in some other largely non-Christian countries: in Japan, for example, New Year is a major event - incorporating older traditions - as it is in India.

The Muslim world has its own Islamic calendar, but in most countries this runs alongside the Western one, and celebrations to mark 1 January are increasingly common.

In China, on the other hand, despite the prevalence of the Gregorian calendar, the local, Chinese New Year is a much bigger occasion.

The same is true in Israel, which marks Jewish New Year in September or October. But there are only a small number of countries where 1 January counts for almost nothing.

In Iran, it is barely acknowledged officially, though marking it is sometimes seen as an act of youthful defiance against the authorities.

In neighbouring Afghanistan - as in Iran - New Year comes in the springtime, and that is that.

January the First is a non-event.

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