Happy New Year!

Why was January 1st chosen as the first day of the new year? What¹s so special about that day? Why not June 1st? Or September 1st? In fact, why not any other of the 364 days of the year?

Well, there is a reason, of sorts. On December 21st, the Winter Solstice, the Sun is lowest in the sky. Solstice means "sun-still," and for several days before and after December 21st, the Sun just seems to rest low in the sky, giving no sign that it will ever be higher: certainly no sign visible to the ancients. Only after about a week is it high enough so it could be noted by ancient astronomers. Hope revived; and so the New Year began.

A year is the time from one Winter Solstice to the next. In 45 B.C., Julius Caesar decreed the year to begin on the first New Moon after the Winter Solstice (you could do things like that if you were emperor.)

The year is about 365 1/4 days long, so 365 days a year weren't enough. To take care oi this problem Caesar instituted a leap year -- a year with an extra day -- every four years. That's how things remained for sixteen hundred years. People were happy using his "Julian" calendar.

  But trouble was brewing. The cycle of the seasons is really about eleven minutes less than 365 1/4 days. That might seem to be an insignificant amount, but it accumulated to ten days by 1582. The dates for the equinoxes -- days when day and night were exactly equal -- and solstices were occurring earlier and earlier each year. In 1582 the Spring Equinox fell on March 11.

At that rate the Spring Equinox, and Easter, would some day fall in December! Though this wouldn't happen for thousands of years, Pope Gregory, who took the long view of things, instituted a new calendar -- really a new system of leap years -- to take care of this slight difference. And it's his calendar, the Gregorian calendar, that we use today.

But what about that extra ten days? Well Pope Gregory decreed that the day after October 4, 1582, would be October 15, 1582. Rents and paydays would be skipped. Riots broke out. The cry was raised "give us back our eleven days!" All because the calendar had to change.

(01/03/07)