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Christmas Series: New Year’s Eve
History of New Year’s Eve
The background of our celebrations
New Year’s Eve, according to the Gregorian Calendar, is the last day of the year, known as Old Year’s Day or St. Sylvester’s Day.
You may remember reading that Emperor Constantine was considered the first “Christian” Roman Emperor. St. Sylvester, the Bishop of Rome, was responsible for baptizing Constantine in the 4th century.
New Year and Astronomy
As I describe here, New Year’s celebrations go back before the Romans to Mesopotamia about 2,000 years B.C. However, those celebrations occurred during the Vernal Equinox in March and moved, during Roman times two millennia later, to January.
This was done at the recommendation of Sosigenes of Alexandria, an ancient astronomer who convinced Julius Caesar to reform the calendar to be a solar one like that of the Ptolemaic Egyptians, not the previous lunar calendar that Rome had been using since the 7th-century B.C. Caesar did this by introducing the Julian Calendar in 46 B.C.
Astronomically speaking, Earth is always closest to the sun in its yearly orbit around this time. This event is called Earth’s perihelion.