New Year’s Resolutions 2025: 3 cultural practices explaining its origins

The practice of New Year’s resolutions most likely dates back 4,000 years ago to 2000 BCE. The ancient Babylonians are credited today as its founders.

According to an article published in The Old Farmer’s Almanac, the Babylonians celebrated the new year in a 12-day festival called Akitu in mid-March, around the time of the spring equinox. The celebration itself blurred the lines between religion and royalty, with the subjects either crowning a new king or reaffirming their loyalty to the incumbent.

During the Akitu, subjects would make promises to their gods to repay their debts and return any objects — usually farm equipment — that they had borrowed. If they adhered to these, it was believed that the gods would favour their endeavours over the following year. And if they failed, they feared they would fall out of favour with the gods. These promises can be thought of today as the precursor to the modern-day New Year’s resolution.

This festival also kicked off the farming season to plant crops.

While the Roman New Year originally coincided with the spring equinox, Julius Caesar’s efforts to tinker with the solar calendar saw its date shift to January 1 from 46 BC. Regarded today as the longest year in history or the Year of Confusion, Caesar sought to correct a long-standing problem with the traditional lunar calendar followed until then.

Caesar sought to align the start of the year with the month named after Janus, the two-faced Roman god embodied in doorways and arches. Janus was viewed as the embodiment of change, looking backwards into the past and forward into the future. Ancient Romans celebrated January 1 by giving offerings to the deity and promised to behave with moral integrity. This meant people greeted each other with kindness and grace, gifted each other figs and sweetmeats, and even worked on the day. All these were viewed as an auspicious start to the year, and a bid to secure Janus’ favour.

Parts of South America, such as Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador, ring in the new year we know with a life-size male doll called the año viejo. Families stuff their dolls with newspapers, rags and other memorabilia dating from the past year, and dress it up in their clothes. The ritual burning, done on New Year’s Eve, represents the symbolic purging of the old to welcome the new, or setting a clean slate. 

According to historians who spoke to The New York Times, the practice is believed to have originated in Ecuador, in major cities like Quito and Guayaquil across the Andean Sierra in the 19th century. Burning the años viejos — Spanish for old year — culminated the year’s end in a 10-day Catholic celebration between the Day of Innocents on December 28 and Three Kings Day on January 6.

María Belén Calvache, an Ecuadorean expert told NYT that the rag dolls traditionally represent drunken old men. These are carried by masked people dressed in white to represent their penniless, weeping widows or viudas. The dolls are burned at midnight, after which a proclamation declares different things which are left to the “mourning widows” – which are usually satirical omens or wishes for prosperity.