Publications

Contact Us

What do you know about that?

What’s in a date?

by Ruth Orr
EARTH —  Happy New Year!  As we enter the first week of January, we enter a new cycle of revolution around the sun.  Don’t we?  Well, yes, but only because we decided we are.

There’s not really any astrological reason for the new year to be celebrated in January, no invisible line in space that we just crossed over to begin our next lap.

In fact, we’ve only been using January 1 as our date for a new year since 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar, which we still use, and declared officially that January 1 would be New Year’s Day forevermore (or until someone decides we need a new calendar).

Prior to that, the new year was celebrated at a number of different points over the course of the year.
How did we pick this date then?  According to Britannica.com, the Roman king Numa Pompilius (c. 715-673 BCE)  kicked off the process when he revised the Roman republican calendar to move the month of January to the beginning of the year, replacing March.

It made sense— January is named for the Roman god Janus, the god of gates, doors, and beginnings.  There is debate about whether or not the month of January even existed before this, and whether or not Numa just invented a new month to suit his needs.

Even then, January 1 was not necessarily the official start of the Roman year until 153 BCE.
Centuries after Numa, in 46 BCE, Julius Caesar introduced his own version of a calendar, the Julian calendar, keeping January 1 as the first of the year.  It didn’t last forever however, because the Roman empire fell in the fifth century CE, and many of the countries that had converted to Christianity under Rome reverted to their previous calendars, with March 25 and Dec. 25 becoming common New Year’s Days.


The Julian calendar was not perfect either.  Julius did notice that the earth’s rotation around the sun was not an even 365 days (it’s 365.24 days), and added an extra day every four years to cope with that problem.
Unfortunately what Julius missed was that for his math to work out, the rotation would have to be every 365.25 days, not .24.  While that may seem negligible, the cumulated mistake over the centuries lead to various events taking place in the wrong season.  The calendar was ten days off what it should’ve been.
This was when Gregory XIII stepped in, and with the help of a whole team of astronomers, declared that every year divisible by four would stay a leap year, except those that are multiples of 100, except those that a multiple of 400.  That fun bit of mildly confusing math means that the years 1600 and 2000 were leap years, but 1900 was not.  The next new century that will also be a leap year is 2400, and then in 2500, we’re back to not-a-leap-year.

More relevant to this column, Greogry also formally restored January 1 as the new year.
The acceptance of the calendar was slow and not universal— Protestant and Orthodox nations weren’t keen on following the pope.  Great Britain and the American colonies didn’t follow the Gregorian calendar until 1752.  They kept celebrating the New Year on March 25.

But what about the countries that don’t fall under the umbrella of “the West”, influenced still by how the Roman Empire did things?

There are plenty of countries and cultures, both in the past and today that were never on board with that.
As globalization has increased and it’s become more and more important for countries to sync up to ensure accurate communications, many of those places have slowly adopted the Gregorian calendar too (China didn’t start using it until 1912).

However, most of those places still maintain their own calendars concurrently with the Gregorian, celebrating their more important holidays on their own, often lunar or lunisolar, calendars.  That is why you see Chinese New Year being celebrated in mid-January to mid- February; Cambodian New Year on April 13 or 14; the Sikh New Year on March 14; the Jewish Rosh Hashannah falling in September or October; and the Ethiopian Enkutatash, celebrated on September 11 or 12.

Ethiopia’s new year, Enkutatash, is of particular interest, because Ethiopia is one of the countries that never adopted the Gregorian calendar at all.  The Ethiopian calendar features twelve months of thirty days each, plus five or six extra days to comprise a thirteenth month.  The sixth extra day is added every four years on August 29 of the Gregorian calendar, six months before the corresponding Gregorian leap day.  The Ethiopian calendar lags behind the Gregorian calendar by seven to eight years, so while we are celebrating the beginning of 2022, the Ethiopian calendar is still in 2014, and their new year is still several months out.
What all this really means is that dates have no meaning aside from what we ascribe to them and you can make up your own calendar with your own new year and it’ll be just as valid as anyone else’s.  Good luck trying to get it into widespread circulation.  For my part, I’m just happy to have more excuses to celebrate spread throughout the year.

“What do you know about that?” is a new column focusing on weird, wacky, wonderful trivia each week.  
If you have suggestions for future trivia columns, or questions about where I got my info, email me at ruth.worldjournal@gmail.com and I’ll see what I can do!

The Pattersons (continued)

by Nancy Christofferson HUERFANO —  Our Georgia Colony pioneers , Joseph Decatur “Cate” Patterson and William Green” Russell,  arrived back in Huerfano County from their

Read More »