Not everyone celebrates the New Year with a glass of champagne and a toast at midnight, many mothers and fathers around the globe celebrate the arrival of the baby New Year with a baby of their own. But there is one newborn, born last night, which will stand out above all the rest born today, January 1, 2007. 
He was born in Singapore in the first minute of the first hour of the first month of this New Year.
Though many other babies have been and will be born today, this young man, who as of six hours ago did not have a name yet, arrived in what would be the first turn of the clock into the New Year. Remember that Singapore is many hours ahead of us here in the United States and they arrived in the New Year well before we did.
So congratulations to his parents, Danny and Kim Hong. Their baby made his intentions clear while they were out to dinner. It would only be a few hours later that he was born, but what a momentous way to enter the New Year and one that truly honors the spirit of the New Year – a time for new beginnings and new opportunities.
11 more babies were born in that Singapore hospital last evening between midnight and 6 a.m. Unsurprisingly, they are all New Year Babies. Many hospitals offer prizes and gifts that are showered on these babies – remarkable for the day of their birth. Many parents in turn, will celebrate this new arrival, by creating a memory box – commemorating the first day of that year with newspapers, clippings and other artifacts to be appreciated in the years to come.
For those of you looking for a few notables for that artifact box marking January 1, here are a few things worth keeping in mind, historically speaking:
January 1st in History:
- 404: Last gladiator competition in Rome
- 1622: Papal Chancery adopts January as beginning of the year
- 1660: Englishman Samuel Pepys begins his famous diary
- 1700: Russia replaces Byzantine with Julian calendar
- 1863: Emancipation Proclamation (ending slavery) issued by Lincoln
- 1901: Australia declares independence from federation of UK colonies
- 1923: Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (USSR) established
- 1934: Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC US bank guarantor) goes into effect
- 1934: Alcatraz officially becomes a federal prison
- 1946: ENIAC, first computer, finished by Mauchly/Eckert
- 1958: European Community (later to become the European Union) is born
- 1973: Britain becomes a member of the European Economic Community
- 1981: Greece becomes the tenth member of the European Economic Community
- 1993: Czechoslovakia split into two separate states
January 1st birthdays:
- 1729: Edmund Burke, British Author
- 1752: Betsy Ross, American flag maker
- 1863: Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics
- 1879: William Fox, Founder of 20th Century Fox film studios
- 1879: E.M Forester, English novelist
- 1895: J. Edgar Hoover, Former head of American F.B.I
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