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Why do we celebrate the new year in January ?

Spring is universally understood to be the season of new beginnings. So why do we celebrate the new year in the depths of winter ( for those who have a winter season in their region) or in the dry season for us here in Cameroon ?

 Romanticon and Samara trace the long, contentious history of the Gregorian calendar.

The wheel of the year is the rise and fall of a human life. The year is born on the vernal equinox as the first flowers bloom and the birds return. It grows and copulates and dances through the spring, celebrates its bounteous zenith at the summer solstice, becomes masterful and wise in autumn, then turns inward in preparation for its transition to winter. On the longest night of the year, the darkest of the dark, the year blows out its last candle and dies.

This pattern, the story of the Vegetation Deity rising and falling, is the ancient framework for the rites of the year. The drama of a human life unfolds in the annual cycle of the seasons. As the constellations twirl above us, so too the repeating myths of the year’s rituals tell the story of human life. In a sense, it’s a way to transcend the cruel joke of age : our wisdom increases as our strength decreases. By acknowledging and celebrating the passage of the seasons, we can grow wiser every autumn and be rejuvenated every spring. We rise and fall like the seasons ; someday we will fall and not rise again, but someone else will, our children and grandchildren and the next generation, and so the big wheel keeps on turning.

Within this cycle, the spring equinox is the time of birth and new life. So why do we celebrate New Year’s in the dead of winter ?

January is not a time for beginnings. It is not a time for initiative or turning over a new leaf. It’s not even an enjoyable time to have a party. Too dark, too cold. This is the time to hibernate, not change a damn thing, stay the course, survive, eat stew, snuggle, sleep.

But this particular calendar, a relatively recent imposition on human existence, seems to be here to stay.

Like nearly all ancient calendars, the first Roman calendar started on the spring equinox (approximately 21 March). The first four months of the Roman calendar were named after gods (Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Junius) and the next six were numbered (Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December). This ten-month calendar, which Romans attributed to their legendary founder Romulus, comprised a year of 304 days.

The 61-day gap in the dead of winter had no name. The days were not marked, and the world was dead ; in fact, it belonged to the dead. The Romans are known for ancestor veneration, which was indeed an important part of their communal life, but there was a precautionary element to it as well. They lived in terror of the vengeful ghosts they deemed responsible for pestilence, death, ruined crops, and drought. These spirits had to be appeased, so the 61 unnamed days of winter were proffered as their time of dominion. During this calendric lacuna, Romans sacrificed goats and dogs, cleaned their houses with salt, and lit bonfires in the dark wintry streets. Especially penitent ones ran through the flames to purify themselves. Nude Luperci priests whipped spectators.

Roman king Numa Pompilius (715-673 BCE) apparently did not fear the wrath of the hungry ghosts and decided to end all this moribund nonsense. He added two more months to the calendar : Ianuarius (after Janus, god of beginnings) and Februarius (‘to cleanse by sacrifice,’ a small nod to the fearful rituals of the nameless winter days). His calendar had 355 days, and January was now its start.

Absolutely everyone ignored this. They continued celebrating the New Year on the vernal equinox as they always had. For the next six hundred years.

In those six hundred years, however, Rome had expanded to span the Italian peninsula, the Mediterranean basin, and much of the Middle East. Running a republic and collecting taxes required a calendar with dates that recurred on an annual basis.

The lunar calendar of Numa Pompilius with its scanty 355 days fell out of sync with our actual 365-day solar year, resulting in all sorts of agricultural complications. Planting usually occurred around the vernal equinox, but the calendar had drifted away until the equinox fell in mid-May, which now had no relevance to the agricultural year. The calendar was an unreliable mess.

Julius Caesar decided to fix this. And after he did that, our ancestors started to celebrate the begining of the year every January. Since we are are crypto lovers since 2008, we started celebrating our begining of the year in January 2009.