Mattress Omni Wishes You a Happy New Year
How many here are making a New Year’s resolution. I know we do! We at Omni Mattress™ give you the best night’s sleep, and that’s a resolution we make every year! Is your New Year’s resolution to be fit, to get healthier, to rest better? Then we have the solution for you!
New Year’s Day is all about new beginnings, but to start anew it makes sense to look back to appreciate where we’ve come from and how we got there. That’s what we want to do with New Year’s Day because New Year’s has an awesome, rich history that’s made it the holiday we celebrate each year. So pour the champagne, break out the noisemakers, and countdown the clock. We’re about to drop knowledge on you about New Year’s Day like we do about our memory foam mattresses. Enjoy!
Out With the Old: One of History’s Oldest Celebrations
We talked about Christmas and how it was a chimera of Germanic, Roman, Viking, and Anglo-Saxon holiday traditions. You would think Christmas is one of the oldest ongoing holidays celebrated in recorded history. Well, you’d be off by a millennium or two.
The first instances of New Year’s Day started in 2000 B.C. That’s right, New Year’s Day the first civilizations celebrated, such as the Babylonians and Sumerians, who marked the vernal equinox as the start of the new year (That’s springtime in layman’s terms.). When the new year starts can be a matter of opinion. The Egyptians started their new year with the Nile river floods. The Chinese began theirs with the second new moon after the winter solstice.
The New Year’s Day we know and love starts on January 1st, and for that, we can thank one of the most famous names in ancient history, Emperor Julius Caesar! He’s famous for a lot of things such as being the first Emperor of Rome, the Ides of March, and one of his biggest contributions, the Julian Calendar. He didn’t make the calendar himself; Caesar ordered someone else to do it for him. The old calendar they used was horribly inaccurate after centuries of use the seasons were way off! So he ordered a new, more accurate calendar made, declared January 1 to be the start of the new year, and, because he loves things named after himself, got his very own month (July).
We got a more accurate Gregorian calendar in 1582, but we can give Julius Caesar credit for New Year’s Day. And why not? It was close to Saturnalia anyway, so why not keep the party going?
How We Came to Celebrate New Year’s Day
New Year’s Day has celebrated throughout Europe thanks to the Julian calendar. So when we went to the new world, New Year’s Day went with it! No New Year’s Day in a country was alike, sometimes it changed with the city! And Canada is no different. We have our own ways of celebrating New Year’s Day. Some we’ve borrowed from our European roots, others from our neighbours to the south, and others still are homegrown traditions uniquely Canadian.
The Canadian New Year’s Tradition
Canada has many unique New Year’s traditions. Here are a few:
- Most Canadian cities will have live music and outdoor parties on New Year’s Eve, capped off with a fireworks display at midnight. Ottawa has the most famous fireworks display in Canada with their New Year’s Eve party on Parliament Hill.
- Some Canadians brave the New Year’s Day Polar Bear Dip. From Halifax, NS, to Victoria, BC, crazy canucks across the nation brave a dip in the frigid waters, outside, on New Year’s Day.
- Who wants to go ice fishing on New Year’s Eve? Frozen lakes across Canada will pop up with ice shacks by from Quebec to BC by New Year’s Eve as friends get together, have a few drinks, and try their hand at ice fishing. It’s not about catching anything, it’s just a good excuse for rural Canadians to hang out and have a great time.
- We hold the New Year’s Levee, unique to Canada, on New Year’s Day. There the Governor General, Lieutenant Governors of the provinces and various armed forces facilities will open their doors and host receptions. You can even belly up to a Legion or a bar and get yourself some moose milk!
- And after a hard night’s party, it’s customary to sleep in on New Year’s Day. Better have a good O Mattress™ memory foam mattress to help you get through the rest of your day!
- But your day isn’t over yet! Hockey games are super popular during New Year’s, whether you’re playing a local game of shimmy or catching the big game on TV! The IIHF World Junior Championships have games on New Year’s Eve. The NHL hosts various games while the Spengler Cup have their final games on New Year’s Day.
What’s in Common on New Year’s
We also share a lot of traditions in common with our neighbours. Here are a few:
- We sing Auld Lang Syne, the New Year’s song by Scottish poet Robbie Burns, and it’s a song about time going by.
- We also tune in to the Times Square rooftop celebration where a big 700-pound iron ball strapped with hundreds of lights gets dropped in a ten-second countdown to ring in the New Year. Millions of people throughout the world watch it on TV, and it was a tradition started in 1907 so fireworks wouldn’t rain hot ambers on the crowds below.
- And speaking of fireworks, it’s a tradition almost as old as New Year’s! It’s all part of the wider tradition of bringing out the noisemakers and rattlers at midnight. It was a way to scare off evil spirits.
- And speaking of old New Year’s traditions, New Year’s resolutions might be the oldest one of them all. Romans, Mesopotamians, and later Christians made New Year’s resolutions about self improvement. New Year’s is a great time to start anew. Make your New Year’s resolution to sleep better and healthier with a gel memory foam mattress from Omni Mattress™!
Wake up to a Brand New You on New Year’s Day
So now you know what New Year’s Day is all about and how we make it one of the biggest parties in our calendar year, how about you make a New Year’s resolution and get yourself a better sleep?
Sleep affects our health, from how alert we are throughout the day to how our muscles and joints feel in our lifetime. Nobody’s at their best when fatigue, back pain and muscle aches ruin their day. So fulfill your New Year’s Resolution with an O Mattress™ from Omni Mattress™, Canada’s favourite mattress!
We back our O Mattress™ with an industry-leading 20-year warranty, not that you’ll need it because memory foam mattresses outlast their innerspring mattress counterparts! The three layers of cooling, supporting and comforting gel memory foam makes O Mattress™ perfect for any sleep. Side sleep, back sleep, stomach sleep, city sleep country sleep any sleep!
And don’t worry if bad credit personal loans are out of reach thanks to bankruptcy or a bad credit history. We help you get approved, the O Powerline™ has the muscle of $3000 in-store credit so you can get a mattress online for you and your family. And if that’s not enough, online purchase financing from PayBright gets you closer to owning the best sleep of your life!
Apply now, your bed in a box is waiting for you on New Year’s Day!