HAPPY NEW YEAR!
I love that Father Time is derived from the Roman god Saturn (equated with the Greek agricultural deity Cronus – hence the scythe). It delights me to imagine Old Man Time devouring the Baby New Year, as in the Goya painting.
It turns out that the concept of Baby New Year has been around a loooooong time, since about 600 B.C. In Ancient Greece, parading a baby through the streets in a basket was supposed to represent the arrival of the newborn Dionysus, god of wine and fertility.
Of course, the Baby would also become a popular midwinter symbol with Christians. By the 1400s, images of Baby Jesus began to be bear inscriptions like “I bring a good year.”
In the 19th century, Baby New Year was secularized by newspaper cartoonists. But his golden age must have been the first half of the 20th century, which coincided with the golden age of illustration. In particular, J.C. Leyendecker – he of “Arrow collar” fame – rendered Baby New Year annually for the Saturday Evening Post, from 1907 to 1943. His popularity led to lots of unfortunate impersonations by half-naked men. In 1936, when the economy began to show signs of recovery, Leyendecker gave the Baby a top hat and turned him into a symbol of prosperity (a mite prematurely, it turned out).
Here’s a gallery of Leyendecker’s Baby New Year illustrations for the Post. As you can see, what starts out as a somewhat cherubic portrayal is soon colored by current events (the birth of flight, women’s suffrage, World War I, the Armistice, and so on).
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/12/new-years-babies/
But I’m a traditionalist. For me, Baby New Year is best served tartare, with perhaps a glass of chilled champagne.