New Year’s Eve as the Globalized Festival

Abstract

There is a universal holiday. A holiday that is celebrated nowadays everywhere in the world regardless of religion, tradition, nation, class, wealth, gender or else: New Year’s Eve, Sylvester’s night. New Year’s Eve has become a mixture of all kinds of celebrations well known from several traditional cultures. New Year’s Eve is at the same time both a traditional and a modern festival. The modern world is future-oriented. This is why the common festival of the modern world is also future-oriented. There is no grain of fundamentalism in the celebration of New Year, since everyone is welcome. Only those who reject the invitation to join are suspect. New Year’s Eve is certainly not majestic, not high-tuned, yet those who celebrate the new year all around the world will be ready, perhaps a little tipsy, to embrace all the others who join them in the festival.