For a New Year

New Years is one of those funny holidays. You can celebrate it several times during the year if you like. You can celebrate the Jewish New Year in the autumn, and the Chinese New Year in the winter. And of course, you can celebrate the New Year along with Dick Clark. When I was a boy, it was Guy Lombardo. He always said that when he died he would take New Years with him. He didn’t, and in the course of history New Years will come and go whether any of us are here to see them or not. But why are there so many New Years?

The reason we have so many New Years Days is because we don’t all use the same calendars. Jews and Muslims follow a lunar calendar. So do the Chinese. Like the solar calendar, the lunar calendar has 12 months. In the lunar calendar each month is 29 ½ days long. To be a little more specific, it is 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, 2.8 seconds, but who’s counting? But why would we ever use the moon as a means to determine time? Early man must have had some reason for using the moon as a unit of measure.

The most obvious unit of measure for time is the sun. From sunrise to sunrise, or sunset to sunset makes a day. That is a logical and useful period of time, except for longer periods. If you consider that early man had a life span of say, 11,000 days or so, that would be an unwieldy period of time to measure in days. In pre-agricultural times, this would not be so important, but once people learned about planting and harvesting, they would have started to notice the importance of the seasons and would need a way to know when it was time to plant and to harvest. So the next logical celestial body is the moon. And the moon is tailor made for such measurements because of its phases.

The lunar year, however, does not match the seasons. There are 354.37 lunar days in a year. That is 11 days short of the solar year. This is important because if you were to start your lunar year with planting time, three years later you would be planting a month too early, and after a decade, you would be planting in mid-winter and the results could be disastrous. The Babylonians figured out that they could adapt the lunar calendar to match the seasons by having a cycle of 12 twelve-month years and 7 thirteen-month years. They had invented a sort of lunar-solar calendar. That way they could keep up with the seasons and still keep the sanctity of the moon. The Hebrews and Greeks both adopted that lunar-solar calendar.

Our calendar is adapted from the ancient Egyptian calendar. Seasons were not of great importance in Egypt, but the flooding of the Nile River was. The Egyptians used a solar year, dividing it into 12 months of 30 days each. Of course at the end of the year, there were 5 days left and the Egyptians kept these as holidays.

The ancient Romans kept a lunar-solar calendar. They kept the calendar aligned with the seasons by adding a month here or there as desired. However, since the priests were elected by political means, years were often adjusted for political reasons. By 46 CE the Roman year was 80 days behind the sun. Julius Caesar, who had been to Egypt (remember Cleopatra?) took the Egyptian calendar back to Rome. Instead of giving everybody 5 days of holidays at the end of the year, he divided the year into 30 day and 31 day months. We really should have 7 thirty day months and 5 thirty-one day months, but the Romans felt that February was an unlucky month so they made that one shorter, giving us the seven 31 day months, four 30 day months and one 28 day month we have today. This is the Julian Calendar.

The Julian calendar was used for quite some time, and is still used in some parts of the world. The problem with it is that the year is not 365 days long. It is 365 ¼ days long. The Julian calendar worked quite well for quite a long time. The problem came with the placement of Easter and the vernal equinox. It had been decided at the Council of Nicea around 325 CE that Easter would be the Sunday after the first new moon after the Vernal Equinox, on March 21st. But because of that ¼ of a day, by 1263, the vernal equinox had moved to March 13th. If something weren’t done, eventually Easter and Christmas would be celebrated on the same day. By 1582, the vernal equinox had shifted to March 11th. That was when Pope Gregory stepped in. The first thing he did was to drop ten days changing October 5, 1582 to October 15, 1582. This brought the calendar back into line with the sun. Then he developed the system of leap years that we have today. So every fourth year we add a day to the Calendar to keep us inline with the sun.

Had the Pope acted back in 1263 when people first started to note the discrepancy, there wouldn’t have been a problem. Unfortunately, by 1582, a good part of Europe was already Protestant. They rejected the Gregorian calendar and kept the Julian. By 1700, however, the Julian calendar was sufficiently out of whack so that Protestant Germany and the Netherlands fell into line and adopted the Gregorian calendar. Great Britain and its colonies continued with the Julian calendar until 1752 when 11 days were dropped from the calendar and the Gregorian calendar was adopted. So September 2, 1752 became September 13, 1752 and people suddenly found themselves 11 days older. There were riots all over England because the Brits demanded their 11 days back. Thus, Washington was not born on Washington’s birthday.

The Eastern orthodox countries were even more stubborn than the Protestant countries. The Russians were not to adopt the Gregorian calendar until after World War I. In fact, the Eastern Orthodox Church still uses the Julian calendar to this day. That is why their Christmas falls on January 6th. It is December 25th on their calendar.

It must be very annoying to those fundamentalists that their perfect God refuses to align the year so that the days, months, seasons, and years work out evenly. But, thanks to all these different calendars we have the opportunity to begin the year several times a year. This gives us the chance to keep on adjusting those New Year’s resolutions. Of course, it also gives us more opportunities to break them. I say we can always use another good reason to celebrate.