Maybe you’ve found yourself skirting an unsavory acquaintance at a New Year’s party as the clock ticks down.
Maybe you’ve watched the ball drop with a palm pushed to an unwanted suitor’s forehead, keeping him at a stiff arm’s distance when midnight hits. Maybe you’ve stood solo in a roomful of couples ringing in the new year with joyful spit-swapping, while you scoffed to yourself, “Why do people even kiss on New Year’s Eve, anyway?”
There are a number of ancient cultures we can thank for this tradition: The Romans, for example, feted the winter solstice with a Saturnalia celebration toward the end of December, indulging in a booze-fueled marathon party that involved both lavish feasts and group sex, according to GQ.
As Food & Wine reports, some believe the New Year’s Eve kiss tradition to be a tamer version of this libidinous Roman festival.
Another old superstition says that the way you start your new year dictates how the next 364 days will go, and to that end, English and Germanic folklore posits that kissing the person you love shores up that relationship in the year to come, YourTango reports.
On the flip side, failure to do so could cosmically doom the partnership, but don’t stress too much about this: Just to give you some context, other fun German New Year’s traditions include melting lead and socking away carp scales in your wallet, for luck, Deutsche Welle reports.
Across Europe, masked balls became popular end-of-year celebrations, and according to Kissing Matters, partygoers’ festive masks symbolized evil spirits. When masks came off at midnight, people would grab the first person they saw and plant one on their new partner, purifying themselves of the past year’s bad vibes.
This tradition looks a lot like the English “saining” practice, which—as astronomer and anthropologist Anthony Aveni told Live Science—meant blessing a person you loved by kissing them, leaving them a little more protected against the malevolent forces thought to proliferate during transitional seasons.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, revelers have long partaken in Hogmanay, a rambunctious NYE celebration that traces its roots back to Viking invasions in the 8th and 9th centuries, according to Historic U.K. One tenacious feature of Hogmanay that remains obligatory today: kissing, and lots of it; kissing everyone in sight, whether friend or stranger.
Centuries worth of accumulated pressure prod us toward mashing our faces together at the stroke of midnight every January 1. But with 2017 shaping up, somewhat surprisingly, to be the year of consent—or, at least, the year we widely acknowledged that grabbing someone without their consent constitutes harassment and will not hold—let’s consider an update on the traditional New Year’s bacchanal:
kissing only those who want to be kissed and keeping our paws off those who don’t. It would be so so nice if sexual misconduct were among the 2017 demons we purged for 2018.
