New Years Traditions

 Last year, one of my sons noted that, other than watching the ball drop in Times Square, there were really no New Year’s traditions. I told him he was wrong, and to prove it (and to get to bed at a decent time!) we didn’t wait up for New York’s new year, but watched the fireworks erupt around the London Eye. Happy New Year, nice and early! Fireworks, champagne, and a kiss might be common worldwide, but here are some other traditions from around the world that you might want to try this year. 

Haruo.takagi, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Fireworks are noisy, but they aren’t the only sound that heralds the new year. In many places, people bang pots and pans as the year turns. In Japan, Buddhist temples ring bells 108 times, once for each of the earthly desires. With each toll, another desire is eliminated so that listeners begin the new year afresh. This tradition is called Joya no Kane, which Japan Today explains means “to throw away the old and move on to the new”: literally ringing out the old, ringing in the new!

Many traditions involve food, especially round food since the shape symbolizes prosperity. In the Philippines, people set out 12 round fruits to symbolize twelve months of prosperity.  Spaniards and Italians pop 12 grapes or raisins into their mouths, one for each chime of the clock marking midnight. In Greece, families hang either an onion or pomegranate on their doors as a symbol of good health, fertility, and longevity. The French welcome the New Year with a stack of pancakes, and people in the Netherlands eat doughnuts and ring-shaped sweet breads.

© Alice Wiegand

But not all New Years foods are round. For good luck, Germans celebrate with marzipan that’s been shaped into a pig and the Japanese eat prawns, which are believed to bring a long life, and herring roe, which is supposed to boost fertility. The Estonians have many feasts on New Year’s Eve, believing that a person gains the strength of a man with each meal consumed. In the Southern part of the U.S., people eat collard greens, whose color symbolizes money, and black-eyed peas for luck and prosperity.  

Another tradition is beginning the year with a clean sweep, literally. In Scotland, this is known as the redding of the house. Everything, from the cabinets to the front door is cleaned, with the fireplace getting special attention. In Cuba, people symbolically mop up bad spirits and negative energy and toss them right out the front door along with the dirty water during the countdown to midnight. The Irish also start the year with a spotless, freshly cleaned home, and set a place at the dinner table for any loved ones who died in the past year.
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Other New Year’s traditions involve movement. Many people go on New Year’s walks or runs, often the first step in

fulfilling one’s resolutions. In Scotland, people observe “first footing,” carefully planning who should be the first to enter the home after midnight. If the first visitor is a tall, dark-haired male bringing pieces of coal, shortbread, salt, a black bun and whiskey, prosperity is assured. One of my friends actually tried this one out last year. 

Danes literally “jump” into the new year.  They leap off chairs or couches when midnight arrives. In Brazil, where revelers wear white to welcome the New Year, they enter the ocean and  jump over seven waves, then walk backwards until they are back on dry land. 

And that ball drop in New York City’s Times Square? It’s been going on since 1907. According to Times Square’s official website, hundreds of thousands of people pack Times Square to watch the ball drop, and more than one billion other’s watch on TV. 

Whatever traditions you and your loved ones follow, here's wishing you a prosperous and safe 2025. 

Ochre: An Ancient and Powerful Color

 Humans have been engaging in art for a long, long time. One of the earliest colors that these artists used is a vibrant red called ochre. Ancient people used it for painting walls, and possibly their skin and clothes. The fact that they often covered burials with ochre suggests they may have believed it to have magical properties.

Marco Almbauer, CC BY-SA 3.0 
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>,
via Wikimedia Commons

Ochre (pronounced OAK-er) is a soft, clay-like rock that is pigmented by hematite, a reddish mineral that contains oxidized iron. It can be ground and mixed with water to make a paint. Since ochre is a mineral, it doesn’t fade or decay with time, allowing its vibrant color to last over the millennia. 

The use of ochre is even older than man. A Homo erectus site in Kenya called GnJh-03 provides the earliest evidence of ancient humans using ochre. Archaeologists found about 70 pieces of ochre weighing about 11 pounds at this site, which dates to about 285,000 years ago.

At an early Neanderthal site in the Netherlands called Maastricht-Belvédère, archaeologists excavated small concentrates of ochre, which they believe was powdered and mixed it with water so that they could paint their skin or clothing.

La Pasiega, a cave in northern Spain, has ochre paintings, including this one of a horse. The paintings are estimated to date to at least 64,000 years ago and it is believed they were created by Neanderthals. Lawrence Straus, a distinguished professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of New Mexico disagrees with both the dating and the attribution of the paintings, arguing that Neanderthals might have used ochre to make non-representational paintings, such as lines and dots, but that it's debatable whether they made more complex cave paintings, such as illustrations of animals or human figures.

Gobierno de Cantabria, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Vincent Mourre / Inrap, CC BY-SA 3.0
via Wikimedia Commons

Blombos Cave, in South Africa shows some of the earliest uses of ochre by modern humans. A small rock flake has a red ochre hashtag on it that was probably painted about 73,000 years ago.

Ancient use of ochre is widespread, and is documented in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Russia and Australia. When people crossed over the Bering Strait land bridge from Siberia and East Asia to the Americas, it appears they brought ochre with them. Once they were here, they continued to mine the soft stone. Powars II, a site in the southern Rocky Mountains of Wyoming, was first mined about 12,800 years ago. It is the only one of the five red- ochre quarries discovered in the Americas that is north of Mesoamerica. 

Ochre was not only used for painting caves. One grave found in Southern Wales, in the United Kingdom, in 1823 had a skeleton that had so much ochre on it that archaeologists speculated that the skeleton must be the remains of an indecent, scarlet woman. It turns out that they were very wrong, and that the famous Red Lady of Paviland is actually the burial of a young man who lived during the Paleolithic about 33,000 years ago.  An Alaskan burial of two infants covered in ochre dates to about 11,500 years ago.

Ochre may have had practical applications as well. Some archaeologists argue that it was as a sunscreen and to keep insects off the skin. 

Some archaeologists believe that because of its color, red ochre is a symbol of blood and was used ceremonially for hunting success. Others think it was a symbol of life and fertility. Even today, the color red brings up strong emotions. When someone says they are seeing red, it means they are very angry. Red hearts are symbols of love. It’s no wonder that ochre has continued to be used as a pigment throughout antiquity, medieval times, the Renaissance, and continues to be used today.

Christmas 1944

 

No one battling in Europe in 1944 knew that this would be the last Christmas of the war. Americans didn’t know they were halfway through the Battle of the Bulge, the major German offensive that had begun December 16 and would end late in January, 1945. This battle, also known as the Ardennes Offensive, raged throughout the densely forested Ardennes region between Belgium and Luxembourg during what was one of the area’s coldest winters on record. About 8 inches of snow lay on the on the ground, and the temperature averaged of 20 degrees Fahrenheit. ​ Christmas was definitely not celebrated in style among the troops. In front line hospitals, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” played on an old gramophone and champagne was served, but nearby, piles of undelivered Christmas cards and packages were drenched with gasoline and set on fire to keep them out of German hands. Years later, Lt. Robert I. Kennedy recalled his Christmas dinner he shared with three other soldiers: ​“One can of hamburger patties and one can of mashed potatoes so cold they were almost frozen. No one had any mess kits or any utensils, so each man reached dirty, bare hands into one can for one patty and with the other dirty hand for a fistful of mashed potatoes.” Life was a little better for Americans who had already been captured. At Stalag Luft III in Sagan, Poland, temperatures hovered just below 0°F, but at least the men were in barracks instead of foxholes. The American Red Cross had packed and shipped 75,000 Christmas parcels containing canned turkey, fruit cake, tobacco, games, and Christmas decorations during the summer of 1944. Kriegies, the English slang for the German Kriegsgefangenen or prisoner of war, used those packages to celebrate. ​The prisoners in Stalag Luft III wrote that they had a gigantic “bash,” and were allowed to roam the grounds. Alcohol, made by fermenting raisins from aid packages, flowed in several camps.  Many camps had Christmas concerts and services. The Christmas pageant at Stalag Luft III was so well attended that not all of the 11,000 POWs were able to attend in the 700 seat auditorium, even though they gave multiple performances. German guards in Stalag VIIA gave their prisoners small Christmas trees from guards, which the men decorated with snowflakes cut from tin cans, lint, food labels, and nails. Donald G. Cassidy Collection (AFC/2001/001/1599), Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress Donald G. Cassidy, who was a Technical Sergeant in the 570th Bomb Squadron, 390th Bomb Group, 8th Air Force, spent Christmas of 1944 in Stalag XVIIB, just outside of the village of Krems, Austria. When he’d first arrived, in December of 1943, he and the other prisoners each received their own Red Cross parcels. Eventually, the supplies dwindled. Guards explained that American planes were bombing the Red Cross supplies. They began dividing parcels between two men when they got them at all. To make up for the loss of parcels, the Germans gave the POWs soap on occasion. The POWs also got ersatz coffee, a coffee substitute made from the taproots of chicory, soybeans, barley, and grains and formed into bricks, and sauerkraut, but the POWs found both so bad tasting that they used it for fuel.  Ministry of Information Photo Division Photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Meanwhile at home, families managed as best as they could. Rationing of sugar and butter made cookie making challenging. Many had to forego the Christmas turkey, since so much of the supply was sent overseas for the troops. Children’s toys were manufactured from wood and paper since metal, rubber, and rayon were all rationed for the war effort. Worst of all was the absence of so many men, and the fears that they might not come back at all, It’s no wonder that many of the songs released during the war, including “White Christmas” (1941), “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” (1943), and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (1944) have a melancholy air to them.

The 80th Anniversary of Two Brutal Massacres

 

This December marks the 80th anniversary of two terrible massacres. Both took place during World War II, but in different theaters of the war. 

The Battle of the Bulge, which began on December 16, 1944. By the time it ended, 40 days later, approximately 600,000 American troops had participated in the largest battle ever fought by the US Army. Fighting in brutal conditions and freezing temperatures, Allied forces managed to stop the Nazi war machine from reversing the gains the Allied forces had made ever since the Normandy invasion. The Allies pushed the German Army back, but at a great price. The U.S. Army lost 19,000 men and suffered more than 80,000 casualties. 23,000 Americans were captured and taken prisoner. 

One of the most horrific events within the Battle of the Bulge was the Malmedy Massacre.  On December 17, 1944, roughly 80 American POWs were led to a field, where they were machine gunned to death by a Waffen-SS unit. 43 men managed to escape into the surrounding forest. Although Allied commanders started receiving news of the massacre by the evening that it occurred, the area was in German hands. Americans didn’t regain access to the area until January 13, 1945, when a Graves Registration Platoon entered the site. Because of the snow and freezing temperatures, the bodies were remarkably well-preserved, but hard to locate.  An engineer platoon used metal detectors to help find them. The field was still a frontline combat area. The infantry occupied foxholes in one corner of the field, and German artillery fire repeatedly disrupted the work. Despite this, 72 bodies were found. After autopsies in a nearby abandoned railway building that had no water or electricity, the Graves Registration Platoon was able to determine by the nature of the wounds that the men were executed, rather than killed in combat. Most of the dead did not wear their mandatory identification tags. Why that was has never been determined. Despite the lack of tags, the GRREG soldiers managed to identify every single victim.

source: WikiCommons

But the massacre at Malmedy was not the only one that happened in December 1944. On the other side of the world, near the city of Puerto Princesa in the Philippine province of Palawan, another horrific event took place on December 14, 1944. It is called the Palawan massacre.

Marines exhume the remains of prisoners who were killed at Palawan.

The men killed in the Palawan massacre had been interned in Palawan Prison Camp, an old Philippine Constabulary barracks since August 12, 1942, when they’d arrived in two transport ships. Originally 300 in number, the men were survivors of the Battle of Bataan and the Battle of Corregidor. For the next two years, they cleared land and constructed a concrete runway for their captors, using only hand tools, wheelbarrows and two small cement mixers. Half of the prisoners were sent back to Manila on September 22, 1944. A month later, the airstrip and nearby harbor came under allied attack and the prisoners were forced to dig trenches 5 feet deep and 4 feet wide for use as bomb shelters. Afraid that the advancing Allies would be able to rescue the prisoners of war, the Japanese sounded an air raid siren. Once the 150 men had entered the trenches, Japanese soldiers set them on fire using barrels of gasoline. Prisoners who tried to escape the flames were shot down by machine gun fire. Others attempted to escape by climbing over a cliff that ran along one side of the trenches, but were later hunted down and killed. 139 of the prisoners were killed. 11 men escaped and were aided by Filipino scouts and guerrillas.

The testimony of one survivor, Pfc. Eugene Nielsen, convinced the US military to embark on a series of rescue campaigns to save the POWs in the Philippines. The raid at Cabanatuan on January 30, 1945, the raid at Santo Tomas Internment Camp on February 3, 1945, the raid of Bilibid Prison on February 4, 1945, and raid at Los Baños on February 23, 1945 all saved POWs from horrible deaths. 

Former Cabanatuan POWs in celebration.wikipedia

Who were the Folsom People?

 

Wild Horse Arroyo, location of the Folsom Site

Between about 10800 BCE and 10200 BCE, a group of people lived throughout much of central North America.  These Paleo-Indians left enough artifacts that archaeologists were able to recognize that their culture was distinct from that which came before them, and that which came after. The discovery of Folsom artifacts, particularly those first found at Wild Horse Arroyo, are significant enough to site have been called the "discovery that changed American archaeology."

It took early scientists quite a while to figure out what they were finding.

Biblical tradition asserted that the world was created 6,000 years ago. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, advances in geology and paleontology began to challenge that date. European discoveries of human bones and artifacts in association with extinct Pleistocene mammals proved that human beings existed side by side with Ice Age mammals. However, most scientific experts thought that humans had been in North America for only a few thousand years. Ales Hrdlicka and William Henry Holmes of the Smithsonian Institution suggested that no one was in the Americas 3,000 years ago. Any scientist who advocated a longer antiquity for inhabitants of the Americas risked being blackballed from academia. 

In 1922, two amateur naturalists, a Raton blacksmith named Carl Schwachheim, and a banker named Fred Howarth visited a section of Wild Horse Arroyo where a cowboy named George McJunkin had discovered extremely large bison bones after a monsoon in August of 1908. McJunkin had recognized that these bones were not from modern bison, and had tried to interest paleontologists in the site, but hadn’t been able to convince anyone to visit the site before he died in 1922.

Carl Schwachheim, left, and Barnum Brown are examining the first Folsom point found in situ, circa 1927. 

Jesse D. Figgins snapped the photo. (Courtesy of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science)

Schwachheim and Howarth collected bones and took them to Jesse Figgins, director of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and to paleontologist Harold Cook. Figgins and Cook were already proponents of human antiquity in the New World. Cook had found a human tooth among the bones of extinct mammals at Snake Creek in Nebraska in 1922. Two years later, excavators at Lone Wolf Creek in Texas reported to Figgins that they had found three projectile points associated with a bison skeleton. However, since Schwachheim and Howarth had presented nothing but bison bones to Figgins and Cook, the two scientists didn’t believe there was anything significant about the site in Wild Horse Arroyo.

In 1926, v Schwachheim, and Howarth took Figgins and Cook to the Folsom site. They began excavations, with the intention of collecting full skeletons of bison antiquus to take back to the museum. But on August 29, 1927, they found man-made stone projectile points in the same layers, and therefore of the same age as, the bison bones. Other archaeologists were invited to see the findings in situ and they agreed that the bison bones and the spear point were contemporaneous. 

However, no one could pinpoint when bison antiquus had lived. At a December 1927 meeting of the American Anthropological Association, archaeologists speculated that the evidence from the Folsom site suggested that man had arrived in the New World 15 to 20 thousand years ago. Speculation about the exact antiquity of Folsom continued until radiocarbon dating came into use in the 1950s and the bison bones at the site could be dated more precisely. Even without an exact date, the Folsom point demonstrated conclusively that human beings were in North America during the last ice age—thousands of years earlier than Hrdliča's 3,000-year limit. Hrdlička, angry at having his theory criticized, managed to make Figgins and Cook were not invited to any of the seven academic symposia devoted to American antiquity which took place from 1927 to 1937.
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The points Figgins and Cook discovered at the Folsom Site in Wildhorse Arroyo were distinctive. Figgins called the culture which created these points the Folsom Culture, named after the small town of Folsom, New Mexico which 

was nearby. Soon after the Folsom Culture was discovered, an earlier group, the Clovis Culture, was found.  Folsom projectiles have a concavity running down their center that Clovis projectiles did not have. Statistical analysis of radiocarbon dates suggest that the earliest Folsom dates overlap with the latest Clovis dates, so the two technologies overlapped for multiple generations. This points to Folsom Culture being an outgrowth of Clovis Culture. It might be that the extinction of most species of megafauna marks the boundary between Clovis and Folsom Cultures. Clovis artifacts are associated with mammoth bones, while Folsom people hunted Bison antiquus, which became extinct about the same time that Folsom evolved into cultures relying on greater dependence on smaller animals and plant foods. It is unknown whether the extinctions of megafauna were caused by climate change or by over-hunting, or both.

Although the Folsom culture is associated with the kill site in Northern New Mexico, it flourished over a large area on the Great Plains, in what is now both the United States and Canada, eastward as far as what is now Illinois and westward into the Rocky Mountains. There is even one Folsom site in Mexico, across the Rio Grande River from El Paso, Texas.