The History Behind Black and Haitian New Year’s Traditions

This New Year’s Eve, many say they will skip the club and celebrate at home. The “sober curious” movement, COVID-19, seasonal depression and refusal to pay the high cost of coverage are among the many reasons. For many others, it follows a long history of tradition.

In fact, for generations, Haitians and black Americans have celebrated the New Year at home and in other places of refuge, through the practice of prayer, often followed by cooking according to sacred recipes. These traditions are deeply connected with the shared history of slavery and freedom.

Today, as we look back to 2024 and prepare for the coming year, many of us will learn from the long traditions of Haitians and Black Americans whose New Year’s practices honor the struggles and triumphs of Black people in America. For centuries, black communities have observed the holiday by reflecting on the past to prepare for the future.

Haitians have had a special New Year’s tradition for centuries. From 1697 to 1804, French colonialism and enslaved labor made Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) the most profitable colony in the Americas. The coffee and sugar fortunes made by the white ruling class depended on the forced labor of 500,000 enslaved people. About two-thirds of Saint-Domingue’s slaves were born in West Africa; they were known as Bosales. Black Creoles, who were born in Saint-Domingue, filled the ranks of both enslaved and free people of color. By November 1803, the Bosales and Creoles rose up and together defeated the French, and their Creole emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haitian independence on January 1, 1804.

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On that day, the rich New Year’s tradition of drinking traditional pumpkin soup began pumpkin soup to mark Haiti’s victory over slavery and colonialism. historian Bayyinah Bello attributes the origin of the soup tradition to Dessalines’ wife, Marie-Claire Heureuse Félicité Bonheur Dessalines. Félicité encouraged the whole country to finally taste the soup that their enslavers had long forbidden them. Juha also paid tribute to those they lost – both during the war and during the many years of forced slavery. Over the following years, Félicité was transformed pumpkin soup from a bowl of anti-blackness and exclusion to a Haitian delicacy that was packed with new meaning: emancipation, decolonization and black sovereignty.

Félicité’s tradition also has roots in Haitian Vodou, one of the country’s oldest religious traditions. Vodou even played an important role in the Haitian Revolution, as the West African lwa or spiritual force Ogo Feray is credited with motivating slaves in Saint-Domingue to seek their freedom.

In Vodou, preparing food for the poor masses has long been a spiritual endeavor. Ritual of poor food (feeding the poor), invites Vodou practitioners to visit cemeteries, intercede for the poor (both living and dead), and prepare a feast that usually includes joumou soup. This process blesses the host’s entire extended family, as only a poor beggar without family has the power to protect them from separation or spiritual misfortune.

Preparing joumou soup on New Year’s Eve 1803, Félicité established January 1 as a national day weak food which is relevant every year. It is still respected and worshiped today. The history of slavery, as well as persistent interference with Haiti’s sovereignty since 1804, caused the famine to become a unifying experience for the nation’s black masses. For more than two centuries, Haitians around the world have maintained Félicité’s tradition of making soup late into the night on December 31st and serving it to whoever gets hungry the next day. Starting the year with less poverty reminds Haitians to enter the new year by seeking blessings from their poor and believing in the proverb “nou tout se moun”, which translates to: everyone is human.

And yet, while Félicité incorporated the principles of universal human rights into the soup joum of 1803, millions of blacks in the United States were still enslaved and preparing for the annual “employment day,” also held on January 1. Employment dayenslavers in the US separated families, trading individuals to form the strongest workforce for the coming year. Runaway slave Harriet Jacobs he detailed that these annual kidnappings and destruction of black families caused some to resist being sold to new enslavers. Their actions were met with whippings and imprisonment until they promised not to flee to their families.

The meaning of the New Year was further complicated when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that all enslaved people in the seceded states would be freed at midnight on January 1, 1863. Blacks gathered illegally in house parties and forests on New Year’s Eve. 1862 to pray and watch the freedom that was promised to them.

However, freedom for black Americans did not come immediately in 1863. Slaves at Somerset Place, North Carolina were told they were emancipated, but unless they moved out of their plantation homes, they were required to continue working the land without pay. When former slaves moved throughout the Albemarle region, they were often overworked and underpaid. This prompted some formerly enslaved people, such as a man named James Augustus, to return to the plantation. For Augustus and others, being paid to exploit was not emancipation. They would choose to stay in Somerset while Black America wrestled with the question of what emancipation would really mean, if enslaved people simply became the working poor.

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There were many more reasons to pray after January 1, 1863, so staying in prayer on New Year’s Eve became an annual tradition. Night vigil services, as the New Year tradition came to be called, continued to be held in homes, houses of worship and forests where the then enslaved people held their first service in 1862. The dilemma of achieving true freedom led them to pray, sing, chant and embody the Holy Spirit for hours until midnight on the first day. Watch Night served to mark the enslaved people’s experience of family separation, emancipation, and the long struggle for freedom.

Today, black Christians still navigate the complex meaning of New Year’s Day—burdened, as it was, with the contradictory meanings of a violent past and the promise of the future—continuing to gather for Night Watch services or “Holy Ghost parties” on December .31 each year. During these services, black Americans praise God for their collective and individual liberation during the previous year. They also struggle spiritually with the fear of what the new year might bring to them and others. In modern times, for many black Americans, the Night’s Watch services embody the anxiety that the new year will tear families apart through mass incarceration, health disparities, and poverty, while also holding a radical hope that social justice, prosperity, and God’s protection will be their future.

As with the strong tradition among Haitians, food is part of New Year’s rituals of black Americans, used to materialize the struggle between feelings of freedom and fear on New Year’s Eve. Food becomes a conduit for black Americans to literally and figuratively digest their harsh history while consuming their hopes and wishes for the new year. On January 1st, black people discuss old-time recipes for greens, cornbread, and hoppin’ John to help manifest health and prosperity.

These New Year’s meals cannot be separated from their role in the physical sustenance of black American ancestors during slavery—but similarly poor foodit is believed that the recipes protect against the evils of poverty and family separation. Hoppin John, the anglicized pronunciation of the French translation for black-eyed peas (pois pigeon), supposedly represents the coins. Scott Alves Barton notes that black-eyed peas are also placed for Ogoa in many African traditional religions because of the revolutionary ability of a spiritual force to open doors or possibilities.

Haitian and Black American New Year’s traditions in different faiths invite us to taste the harsh realities of the past and pray for the dangers that lie ahead. These black prayer practices and sacred recipes affirm that each year brings blessings and continues the long journey toward freedom. With full bellies and prayerful hearts, they invite us to welcome the New Year full of justice and joy, celebration and mourning, wealth and scarcity, life and death.

Reverend Nyya Toussaint is an expert on social movements within the black faith. His family hails from the Latibonite coast of Haiti and the waterways of Albemarle Sound in North Carolina.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME’s editors.