[MR] Wikipedia: January 1, Not Always New Year's Day

[Garth Groff and Sally Sanford]

Noble Friends,

Ah! New Year's day, the time for soon-to-be-broken resolutions and massive
hang-overs. But it wasn't always so.

Starting the year on 1 January began with Julius Caesar. It seems that a
whole bunch of calendars were in use across the growing empire at that
time, usually based on lunar or solar reckoning. That reckoning didn't
account for the fact that the year is 365 1/4 days long, less a
tiny fraction. Caesar called upon the best Greek astronomers and
mathematicians to come up with a better calendar that accounted for the
fractional 1/4 day. The simple solution was an extra day in so-called leap
years. It still wasn't quite perfect, but it worked pretty well for a long
time.

The Julian calendar officially began on 1 Ianuarius (January) 45 BC, with
the first day of Ianuarius from then on being considered the first day of
the year, and that's when the annual hang-over came into being. The Julian
calendar was used across most of the Roman Empire and throughout what
became medieval Europe. When the Byzantine Empire formed and Rome
collapsed, the Eastern Empire continued using the Julian calendar, but
moved their new year's day to 1 September.

There were two problems with the Julian calendar. The first was that figure
of 365 1/4 days still wasn't quite right. It really should have been
365.2425 days. That missing little fraction added up, and by the late
middle ages the "drift' of those accumulated fractional days had thrown the
calendar way out of whack. Enter Pope Gregory XIII. His concern was that
the Julian calendar's inaccuracy made it difficult to calculate the proper
date for Easter (which is a moveable feast, rattling around every year
within March or April). The new Gregorian calendar came into effect in
1582, adding leap-leap days every four hundred years to almost solve the
problem. The Julian drift was fixed by obliterating about one-third of
October 1582. October 4 was immediately followed by October 15 that year,
and a whole bunch of birthday parties had to be skipped. Most of Catholic
Europe adopted the calendar right away, but Protestant countries dragged
their feet.

The second problem with Julius' calendar was that not everybody wanted the
year to start on 1 January. In various countries the new year began on
certain Christian feast days, although most were using the Julian calendar.
In some places it was Christmas day, in others it was 25 March (Lady Day)
or even Easter itself, despite that holiday having no fixed abode. Even
before the Gregorian calendar was set, France adopted 1 January in 1564,
followed by most of the other European countries. Protestant Scotland did
so in 1600.

England/Great Britain and all her colonies stubbornly held onto the Julian
calendar with 25 March as new year's day until 1752, even though Scotland
was by then part of Great Britain, and almost everybody on both sides of
the border was partying on 31 December. When Parliament finally passed the
law adopting the Gregorian calendar, they had to chop 11 days from
September to come into alignment. This is still reflected in the UK's tax
year, which ends on 5 April, adjusted from the traditional 25 March.

Did all this really matter? Well, yes. Fixing the date for the new year not
only made life easier for historians, it also was needed for growth in
international commerce. Merchants, bankers, lenders, and yes, even taxing
governments, all needed to be on the same page to make international
commerce work.

So my good friends, the whole thing is/was messy, very messy, but we are
more or less on track now. If humanity survives Global Warming, we will
eventually have to make an additional adjustment for the slowing of the
Earth's orbit around the sun. But let's not worry about that today.
Instead, let's worry about headaches after last night's excesses.

Yours Aye,


Lord Mungo Napier, Laird of Mallard Lodge  🦆
(A Scot permanently stuck in 1496)