Have you ever wondered why we celebrate January 1 as the first day of the year?
I am sure that some of you are much smarter than I am and know the answer and have known the answer for many years.
Well, I admit I knew a little bit about why, but I had to do more research to discover the whole truth?
So this is for us who didn’t know the complete answer.
A new year might have been first celebrated in Mesopotamia 2,000 years before the birth of Jesus. The Babylonians celebrated the beginning of a new year in what we know as March following the first new moon and after the vernal equinox. The celebration was a festival called Akitu.
I wonder if they were actually the first people to celebrate the beginning of a new year? Where in the world did they get the idea that a new year was needed in the first place?
But we have to take ancient historians at their word don’t we? Anyway, that is the story they recorded, and who am I to doubt them?
Then later, with Rome’s first real dictator Julius in 45 B.C., who was the first to call himself Caesar, a new calendar was born. He decided he needed to reorganize the calendar that was a mess, I am told, so he decided January 1 is the beginning of the new year. That is how it became known as the Julian calendar.
The old Roman calendar was truly a disaster that dates back to the 7th century B.C. Some had 10 months, the first day of the year was December 25 and then again March 25. They kept changing it around, even using September as the first day of the new year.
The problem was they could not get the number of days in the year worked out. New politicians wanted to keep adding and subtracting days to fit their needs. Was it 355 or 365 days or something else?
Heeding the advice of the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes, old Julius Caesar finally decided to drop the lunar cycle and favor a solar year just like the Egyptians had been doing for centuries. This then became known as the Julian calendar.
There were still those darn extra days to contend with. Caesar never got that worked out.
Later, Pope Gregory XIII got involved in the late 1500s. He said all we needed was a leap year to straighten everything out. So, he decided for every fourth year poor old February would be the goat, I guess, for reasons known only to him. Did you ever know anyone who had the good fortune to be born on February 29?
Most all of Europe immediately accepted the new Gregorian calendar idea. But there were holdouts, naturally. Russia, Britain and the American colonies stuck to the old Julian calendar.
But finally in 1752 Britain accepted the new calendar along with her colonies. Russia was the last hold out until about 1918 perhaps.
There are, however, other cultures that have a different first day of the new year primarily because of their religious practices.
Some think Jesus of Nazareth’s birth is the beginning of a new year, but apparently Jesus birth had nothing to do with it. Today, the Gregorian calendar is the most widely accepted.
If you understand all of this, please explain it to me next time you see me. But I did try, didn’t I?
Happy new year, everyone!
Ed Mergele is the local VFW Post 688 historian.
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