The tradition of Persian New Year lives on thousands of years later across the Pacific Ocean in downtown Vancouver.
Yasmine Modaresi (she/her) // News Editor
Neeka Yazdani (she/they) // Illustrator
Throughout most of the Western world, the dawn of a new era emerges at midnight on January 1— in the middle of winter. I always thought celebrating new beginnings and rebirth, a personal renaissance, was odd to do on an arbitrary day following the Winter Solstice. After all, the natural world in the northern hemisphere sleeps deeply through nights that last more than half of the day’s duration, but I digress.
A long time ago, when they were a more pragmatic people, the Romans, like the Persians, celebrated New Year in March. This made sense for most ancient cultures as March was the month housing the world’s awakening by bringing the Spring Equinox. The ancient world had such a poetic way of aligning tradition with nature’s natural rhythm, until 46 BCE when Julius Caesar decided that the entire Roman world needed a new calendar.
While change arrived and persevered across the Western world from 46 BCE onward, in Western Asia, the 3,000-year-old Zoroastrian tradition of Nowruz (literally meaning “new day”) thrived on, and to this day, despite displacement and cultural erosion, Persians continue to nourish this tradition of rebirth, renewal, rejuvenation and the harmonious balance of nature.
With epic tales of religious rivalry, invasion and, today, the mass displacement of Persian people, I’m sure that the celebrations have changed significantly from what they were 3,000 years ago. Still, across continents and seas, the tradition perseveres here in Vancouver after all this time.
Growing up as a first-generation Canadian, I distinctly remember the festivity that permeated the city leading up to the first day of spring. Vancouver has a natural proclivity to rainy, dreary weather that tends to leave everyone rather depressed, but the promise that winter would soon break and new life would begin to blossom created an anticipation that was undeniable. Nowruz isn’t just a single day the way New Year is, but rather a collective frenzy that percolates in the community for weeks before erupting into grand celebrations.
What Nowruz means to me today as an adult has evolved significantly from what it meant to me as a child. Being someone with a dual identity, the entire holiday was shrouded in mystery to me, foreign and native simultaneously. The Persian diaspora is diverse, with many religious sentiments, cultural backgrounds and nationalities. We are a people far removed from the traditional beliefs of our ancestors; hardly anyone I know celebrates Nowruz as the religious festival that it is meant to be. As a displaced person, this makes sense to me now, but everything was much more nuanced throughout my childhood.
The tangible shift in energy leading up to the break of spring was undeniable: in a collective frenzy, pretty much everyone you knew was obsessively cleaning their homes in a ritual called khooneh tekouni (literally ‘shaking the house’). At the same time, we were all getting fat. Culturally, Persians are known for eating mounds of burnt rice in sweet and savoury sauces and sweet treats packed with sugar and fat with crystalized sugar (nabat) for snacking on the side. This drunkenness on good food only escalates in the late winter, when various dried fruits, honey-candied nuts, and pastries become so abundant in shops and homes that wearing jeans or tight-button-ups is impossible.
The duration of the actual celebrations is typically 13 days, and the traditions filling these days all create a constant reminder of the themes of the natural world around spring to help members of the community personify the natural rhythm of life in each breath, with rituals emphasizing purification, renewal and community building. As the days slowly stretch longer and the cold nights grow shorter, people begin to come out of their long hibernation and seek excitement—at least, that’s the case for me. As we collectively move into the new season, anyone can engage in the anticipation of spring alongside the Persian community by gift giving, get disciplined to overcome bad habits and set goals for success, spending time in nature, and partying hard at Ambleside Beach’s annual Persian Fire festival between March 18 and March 20, 2025.