New Year’s Eve 1837-38, from George Cruikshank’s : Comic Almanack, January 1838

 Nowhere is New Year celebrated with greater solemnity than at the courts of various rules of continental Europe. True, in some instances – as, for instance, at Berlin and at Vienna – Christmas-trees and distribution of gifts are arranged for the royal children a week earlier. But this in no sense diminishes the importance of the New Year’s Day solemnities, and if Christmas has gradually become the annual festival of the family, New Year’s Day continues to remain the principal feast of the year at court, as well as in political, military, and administrative service. 

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It speaks well for these monarchs of the Old World that with the solitary exception of King Leopold, who holds religion in very small esteem, there is not one of them that does not commence the new year with an appeal to the Almighty for strength, guidance, and blessing. In England, however, the queen is the only member of the royal family who ever dreams of attending divine service on New Year’s morning.

At the courts where there is known as the Orthodox Greek faith is professed, and where, consequently, the old calendar is still in force, New Year’s Day is celebrated a fortnight later.

King Humbert, who owing to the ban of the Church is unable to indulge in a high pontifical mass, begins New Year’s Day by attending a low mass said by his chaplain in the chapel that has been arranged at the Quirinal. After mass is over, king and queen stand on the dais under the canopy in front of their chair of state in the throne-room, to receive with due formality the various parliamentary, military, judicial, and administrative delegations commissioned to lay at the feet of their majesties the good wishes of various bodies which they represent. Later the king begins to stroll about the various apartments, and a good deal of freedom and abandon prevails until the supper-hour is announced. The royal party then march in procession to a small supper-room and with the ambassadors and their wives take their places at tables adorned with that magnificent golden plate for which the house of Savoy is so famous, while the remainder of the guests rush pell-mell and in a very undignified fashion to the buffets, which are literally taken by storm and quickly devastated, so far as everything in the nature of food or drink is concerned. 

From Curiosities of Popular Customs and of Rites, Ceremonies, Observances, and Miscellaneous Antiquities by William S. Walsh, 1898. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company.

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