New Year’s Eve
31 December 2026
New Year’s Eve is 31 December, the last evening of the year. In the United States it is a night of parties, countdowns and fireworks, and it is not a federal holiday. In 2026 it falls on a Thursday, and timeanddate.com lists it as a state holiday in Michigan and Wisconsin; the next morning is a federal holiday, so many offices close for two days.
The oldest American observance on the date is religious. Watch Night services were held by Moravians and Methodists in the 18th century; on the night of 31 December 1862, enslaved and free African Americans gathered in churches, many secretly, to wait for the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect at midnight. The tradition is still kept, and the night is called Freedom’s Eve.
The street party in Times Square began with a newspaper. The first celebration there was held on 31 December 1904 to mark the opening of the New York Times’s new headquarters; when the city banned fireworks two years later, the paper’s owner, Adolph Ochs, had a ball lowered from the flagpole instead. The first ball was iron and wood, 700 pounds, with 100 light bulbs.
A ball has come down from One Times Square every year since 1907, except 1942 and 1943, when the wartime dimout of lights in New York City stopped the ceremony. The current ball was introduced in November 2025: the Constellation Ball, the ninth in the series, 12.5 feet across, 12,350 pounds, with 5,280 crystals. The descent takes one minute, starting at 11:59 p.m.
In Black churches the night ends with the Watch Night service running into the new year, and the first meal of the year is often black-eyed peas and greens. In New York, hundreds of thousands of people wait in the cold around One Times Square, and the organizers estimate the worldwide television audience at over a billion. The next day is a federal holiday.
Sources
- Times Square Alliance, “History of New Year’s Eve & the Times Square Ball”
- National Museum of African American History and Culture, “The Historical Legacy of Watch Night”
- National Park Service, “Freedom’s Eve”
- U.S. Office of Personnel Management, “Federal Holidays”
- Timeanddate.com, “Holidays and Observances in the United States in 2026”
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