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Christmas Series: New Year’s Day
History of New Year’s Day
It Wasn’t Always on January 1
We have the ancient Romans to thank for celebrating New Year’s Day on January 1. It wasn’t always that way. Previous civilizations celebrated it in March to observe the “new year” of growth and fertility.
Before calendars existed, the time between seed sowing and harvesting was considered a cycle or a year. However, the Romans moved the date of the New Year to January 1, as I’ll explain below. First, a little about calendars.
The word Calendar comes from the first day of a month in the Roman (Latin) calendar: kalendae. In contrast, the middle of the Roman month is the ides.
Different Calendars
A variety of calendars were developed for all kinds of purposes:
- Religious: “holy days” or holidays. Some can be regional and historical: Christian, Chinese, Jewish, and Islamic.
- Astronomical: connecting the movement of celestial objects in the sky. There may be lunar (Jewish), solar (Julian), or even lunisolar calendars (Gregorian.)
- Commercial: tracking trade and billing.
- Arithmetic: for calculating differences between dates. Because there was no Year 0, the…