I'm tired of the snarky set of commentary you now routinely get about "why" is January 1 the start of the New Year and "why" do we celebrate it anyhow.*
A person can pick a different calendar date to start a new year, to be sure. And other cultures do. But of interest, all this really does it to point out a couple of things.
People, all people everywhere, are well aware that the year is a year long. We've known that from day one, by observing the passing of the seasons, although more and more it seems that part of the our separation from nature involves not even being aware of that fact.
And people seem to need to mark that passing, if for no other reason than to mark their successes and failures and hope to continue them or correct them. People who emphasize the "why celebrate" type of line of thinking must feel that the world is on a simply wonderful coarse all the time and needs not course correction at all. They're wrong. And most people's lives can use some self reflection as well.
As for the date, the snarky will point that on the Old Calendar, which the Orthodox and Protestants used after Pope Gregory had the calendar corrected, and which even the UK and by extension British North America continued to use until 1752, there were some who celebrated the New Year as starting in March.
More particularly, however, they were starting the New Year with the Feast of the Annunciation, which made sense as its the beginning of things Christian. So snarks who like to point that out probably ought to consider that it wasn't a right of spring or some such nonsense that those Christian people were celebrating by choosing late March as the beginning of the year.* They were marking what they felt to be the beginning of the Liturgical Year at the time, something that meant a great deal to them.
Most cultures, however, seem to place the start of the year in the Fall and Winter, and there's some deep seated reason for that. The Jewish New Year starts in September, early Fall, but after the work of the year was over and the waiting for the beginning of the next year's work had commenced. Egyptian and Ethiopian Coptic calendars also start the New Year in September The Vietnamese New Year, Tet, moves as its based on a lunar calendar, but its always in January or February. Chinese New Year is the exact same, and indeed might be on the exact same date (I'm not sure).** The Korean lunar New Year likewise is at the same time of the year and in contemporary South Korea, Koreans get both New Years Day (January 1) off and an additional three days for lunar new year. Plains Indian Tribes marked the year via "winter counts" which varied somewhat, but which were based on the winter. The Sioux, for example, started the new year with the first snowfall.
Now, of course, not every calendar runs that way. But the fact that enough place the new year sometime in the cold months says something. And before somebody says "well, what about the half the people in the Southern Hemisphere", 68% of the landmass of earth is in the Norther Hemisphere. And through the course and accidents of history, while there were advanced cultures south of the hemisphere, the fact is that most (not all, but most) of the cultures that contributed to the advance of history have lived in the Northern Hemisphere, if perhaps for no other reason that that most people live where the land is.***
There is something going on when most people in the world do the same thing, no matter how broadly spaced out they are. And most cultures in the world have put the new year in the cold months and most of them have a celebration for it. That shouldn't' be lightly ignored, if at no other level, than on the personal one.
_________________________________________________________________________________*I'll confess that I've been a prime exhibitor of such snark myself, at least on a stated level. But as W. E. B. Dubois stated, "only a fool never changes his mind". For various reasons, I've really changed my view, but then on a personal level, I've always marked the changing of the year. Maybe this year I'm just noting the other view more, which runs from the New York Times (at least in comments) to Dilbert, but that view ignores something different.
**Which meant that they were celebrating the start of the New Year and then going right into Easter, assuming that they hadn't already celebrated Easter (which moves on the calendar), all why trying to get crops in, etc. It probably didn't have that "new" year feel to it really.
**Indeed, it's a unique phenomenon of modern life that a lot of the same snarks who will sneer at Pope Gregory adopting January 1 as the the start of the year will gush and gush about Chinese and Vietnamese lunar new years, which follow soon thereafter.
***And, before somebody goes off half corked on it, well over half of Africa is in the Northern Hemisphere and I'm not making some sort of Eurocentric assertion here.. Indeed, when looked at this way, the significant exceptions to the calendar rule would be the Mayans, who live in the Northern Hemisphere but whose new year was in July. Sure, there are other dates, including in Africa, but as I've already pointed out, at least three cultures with their base in Africa celebrate the New Years in the noted time frames.
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