New Year's Day 2025

Government offices and schools are closed on that day and most of organisations and business are not working. According to the Gregorian calendar the year starts January the 1st. It has been widely accepted as a civil calendar in the areas such as: both American continents, Western and Central Europe, Australia, most of the African countries and in some parts of Asia. Due to the differences between religions, the Gregorian Catholic calendar (introduced by the Catholic Pope Gregory XIII) has not been accepted in some countries. For example, Iran and Afghanistan use a calendar that is called 'Solar Hejri'. Ethiopia and Nepal use their own national calendars and a large part of Eastern Orthodox Church still uses the Julian calendar that was proposed by Julius Caesar in the previous era, before the birth of Christ. The New Year for many is associated with a new beginning and due to that, the modern market focuses on providing different options that can satisfy the needs that come with this superb idea of the new beginnings. As a result, gym memberships reach their peak sales numbers, life couches have full schedules and services that help in career change are busy with recruitment processes. The American Dream is being talked about and various ways of achieving it are presented on television, in every newspaper in the country and it is discussed around every corner of social media. In America there is also another occurrence, less popular in the other parts of the world, known as the New Year's Baby. The image of a baby representing the New Year has come from an old Greek tradition. In ancient Greece people used to take a newborn child, place it in the basket and carry it around the town in a parade. All of that in order to celebrate the rebirth of the god Dionysus that symbolized fertility. In the 20th century the baby was still carried from place to place but not literally. The babies that were born first after midnight on New Year's would receive a lot of media attention. Whether it is New York City or a small village in the southern part of the country, they would become stars just because they were born at the 'right' time. The media attention towards the New Year's Babies can be traced back to 1906 when 'The Saturday Evening Post' started publishing the names and pictures of the babies born earliest in the year. Nowadays, due to the new laws that aim to protect children's privacy, the phenomenon starts slowly decreasing. The hospitals are no longer allowed to notify media by themselves due to data protection but many parents still inform the news on their own which might soon be also regulated and restricted.