Why Our Year Starts in January

DUKES FANS: “An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.” Bill Vaughan Human History, Ritual, and the New Year This Tuesday night into early Wednesday is a big time for most of the world. We are saying “Goodbye” to the year 2024 and saying, “Hello” to the year 2025. Here in the US and around the world there will be tons of celebrations, ceremonies, religious rituals, parties, and more as the majority of the world celebrates making this move from one year into the next. The parties and celebrations this year, though, will be very different from the wild revelry that is usually associated with this holiday. There are many post-COVID restrictions on what is allowed at public municipal celebrations-no alcohol is allowed to be brought in to the big New York City celebration this year, for example. Nonetheless, it will still be big and noisy. And billions of people will stay up until midnight to watch and to countdown the dropping of the ball. New Year's Eve and New Year's Day are probably the most universally celebrated public holidays in the world. For most of the world, that means December 31st rolling into January 1st. That is relatively recent, though. For most of human history, New Years did not mean those dates, and in some cultures, it still doesn't. Seeing December 31st as "2024" and January 1st as "2025" represents the relatively recent triumph of the Western World's sense of time over those of other, more ancient cultures. The calendar with which we are familiar is less than 500 years old, and the idea of starting a new year in January is less than 3000 years old. And it is, when you think of it, strange to be starting a new year in what is for many parts of the world, winter. The idea celebrating a "new year" is not strange; it has been part of human ritual and tradition for thousands of years. The first recorded celebrations of a “new year’ come from some 4000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the civilization developed along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq. This was the place most historians agree urban living, or "civilization", started. And like most religious and cultural celebrations of long standing, it was tied to what nature was doing at a certain time. Around the spring and fall equinoxes, when days and nights were of equal length, Mesopotamians celebrated both the planting (spring) and the harvest (fall) as days of renewal for the earth, and especially for the cities and their surrounding farmlands. “Akitu” was the name of the festival, and historians look to those ancient celebrations as the first recorded instances of regular, culture-wide celebrations of a “new year.” Of course, such celebrations are probably much older; humans did lots of things long before writing and keeping records were invented. But once farming and agriculture became mainstays of human activity large numbers of people simply had to know when the ideal times were to plant and to harvest; civilizations depend on that for their existence. So for thousands of years and in most cultures, it was spring that was viewed as the beginning of a new year. And why not? Flowers are budding, animals are emerging from hibernation or returning to feeding grounds and mating, and days were longer. That cycle of the seasons was noted and revered. The earth was being “born again” right in front of and around us, so celebrating that time as a “new year” made sense. This "spring-as-new year" idea can easily be seen in the practices of many religions, even today. Some of the most significant holidays-holy days-of many religions are in the spring. Like spring, Easter and Passover, are both about renewal and rebirth, actually and/or metaphorically. Knowing this cycle of the seasons was essential knowledge for us as a species, and humans have long built their most important rituals around our “essential knowledges." So how did we get from the cycle of the seasons being what determines the new year to an almost universal acceptance of January as the new year? What happened? In 46 B.C.E. Julius Caesar, the leader of the Roman Empire, faced a challenge. Empires control many peoples and many different cultures across many miles. To operate at peak efficiency, they needed an "empire-wide" sense of time, especially for trade, religion, and law. Julius invited Sosigenes, a noted astronomer from Egypt, to come to Rome and create a new calendar to unify and regularize the empire's sense of time. This astronomer moved the Roman Empire's calendar from the movable dates of a lunar (moon) based calendar to the more regularly dated solar (sun) based calendar. Doing this moved the start of the calendar year from March (spring) back to January. Further adding to the changes, the Roman Senate decided in 42 B.C.E. to honor the by-then assassinated Caesar by making January 1 a day of tribute to him. This meshed very nicely with Roman religion and symbolism, and it firmly implanted that date as the start of a new year across the Empire. The Romans already had a god of gates and beginnings named Janus, for whom the month of January is named. Janus was two headed, with one head looking backward and the other one looking forward. This became the perfect metaphor for the idea of a new year: look back at what had already happened and look forward to what is yet to come. January had become the start of a "new year" under what became called the Julian calendar. This lasted throughout the Empire for centuries. But as the Roman Empire broke up, when the new year started once again became a confusing mélange of dates. The Catholic Church, in an attempt to create a unified Europe, drew up a new calendar in 1582 under the leadership of Pope Gregory the 13th. This calendar, since called the Gregorian Calendar, is the one in use in most of the world today. It kept the new year as starting on January 1st, and as European Christian countries came to dominate much of the world, the new year's date around the world gradually came to be January 1st. Yes, there are still cultures and calendars which celebrate the new year at different times among and for themselves; the Jewish, Islamic, Chinese, and Baha'i calendars are all prime examples of this. (They celebrate the new year in the fall, summer, later winter, and spring respectively). But the regular, everyday world we all know, and especially the business and political worlds we know, now go by the Gregorian calendar and recognize the start of a New Year as January 1st. So this Wednesday will be the start of 2025, regardless of how out of step that is with most of human history. As we head into this next new beginning, I wish you all a time of thoughtfulness, hope, strength, fun, hope, good spirits, good company, and good food. These are worrisome and challenging times-no doubt about it. But we humans have faced such times before, and with faith, unity, support, consistent hard work, and especially through friendship and through community, we have endured and even flourished in some very important ways. That is also an essential trait of being human-we can often respond to hard times in some pretty remarkable ways. So whenever, wherever, and however you celebrate it, I wish each of you a happy and wonderful start to the new year. We all have a chance to make new history all over again. How about that?! Happy New Year!

The Magic and Meanings of December Lights

DUKES FANS: December Skies: It gets dark noticeably earlier now, and I am unabashedly in love with winter skies. I have been spending parts of several evenings since Daylight Savings Time ended standing outside at about 8PM and looking up at the southwest part of the sky. The moon has gone through several phases over the last weeks, and it seems so powerful and quietly majestic up there, particularly when there is that seeming haze and shadow surrounding it. The stars seem brighter and more dramatic against the deeper and darker blues that characterize the night sky at this time of the year. The constellations seem clearer and larger. At times like this I think much more about light and dark-about how those two concepts so clearly manifest themselves as winter progresses. With all of the Christmas lights and candles appearing on porches, houses, streets, and in store windows, I am once again awakened to the importance of light to us humans. It is quietly wonderful. I remembered a piece I wrote about light several years ago, and I thought I would dig it out and share it again. I hope you like it. Let There Be Light: December is a month overflowing with observances and rituals. There are so many celebrations from so many different religious and ethnic traditions from around the world that take place during this month. There is, of course, Christmas and the various minor celebrations leading up to and associated with it: Advent, the 12 Days of Christmas, Yule, and others, depending on your ethnicity, culture, and religious tradition. There is also Hanukkah with its 8 days of oil-based food, candles, and dreidel playing. There is Kwanzaa, with its celebration of Pan-African culture, candles, and values. And if you are Buddhist, Hopi, Hindu, traditional Persian, Wiccan, or West African Dogon, there are celebrations for you as well during this month. What so many of these celebrations and observances have in common is the prominence of light in their observances. Candles, bonfires, logs, electric lights, tree lights, flashing lights-light is a common element, metaphor and symbol world -wide at this time of the year. And our rituals clearly bring that home. It make perfect sense that humans are light conscious in December. Humans look to nature to try to figure out what is coming and what God or the gods have in store for us. For most of our history that has meant looking to the sky-to the sun, the moon and the stars. Humans have known for centuries that the length of the days was changing at this time of the year and that the winter solstice was coming. This became a time of deep spiritual meaning for early humans, and it was marked in many different ways depending upon geography and culture. As the length of the days slowly increased, it was as if the earth was being reborn, and we were living through and witnessing that process. We had to acknowledge that and honor it, else it may not happen again. So symbolically, many cultures created rituals that recognized it as a time of rebirth. Many of the stories, myths and traditions from different times and places began to associate the time leading to and just after the solstice with miraculous births, enlightenment, miracles, and/or new beginnings. The Druid bonfires and the Germanic and Norse Yule logs, for example, were symbolic and metaphoric symbols of cleansing, sacrifice, and the simultaneous death and rebirth of the earth-from the shortest day of the year to gradually more and more hours of sunlight. To the ancient Persians this was the time of the Yalda festival, and Mithras, the symbol of truth, strength, goodness and light, was born to a virgin mother at this time of the year. His birth was celebrated with flame and holy fire. Sol Invictus, the Roman sun god, was also celebrated at this time. We humans even long ago seemed to know that we had to meet the darkness with light. New beginnings are important in most religious traditions, and light was a strong metaphor for that. Our language today shows that it still is. We speak of, “seeing the light, or “coming into the light.” There is the “inner light,” and we also “let our light shine.” We use light as a symbol for transformation and rebirth, and these qualities are readily spoken of and alluded to in many of the rituals and ceremonies that occur at this time of the year. Hanukkah is about rebirth and new beginnings as it celebrates the re-dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem from its desecration when Antiochus made it into a Greek temple. The candles symbolize, in part, the rebirth of the religion. The candles in Kwanzaa symbolize the reawakened connection and awareness of African values and connections for people of African descent. To Buddhists, Bodhi Day in December celebrates the Buddha becoming a Buddha-an enlightened one who suddenly could see beyond illusion. To Christians, the Star of Bethlehem led to a new beginning for humans, as it led the Wise Men to the birthplace of Jesus. Light was symbolically leading us forward. And light is as powerful today to us humans as it was long ago when we first figured out what the solstice was and what it could mean. Tradition has it that Martin Luther saw stars one night as he was composing a sermon and tried to capture their beauty by adding lighted candles to the Christmas tree inside his house. Whether that is true or not, by the time the Germanic tradition of the Christmas tree reached the US the idea of lights were a fixture. And now there are lighted houses, malls, streets, yards, shops and more. We are awash in lights; there are even whole streets and neighborhoods that collaborate to plan what their light scheme is going to be each holiday season. And many families now have a tradition of driving to visit different neighborhoods just to see the light displays. So our ancient connections to the rhythms and structures of the natural world are still with us, even if we do not recognize them as such. As up to date and modern as we are in this digital age, we are still human. That means we are still connected to our ancestors in some important and primal ways. As we celebrate our various rituals, traditions and personal rituals this season, I hope you can spend some time thinking about the links between what we do now and what we as a species have always done. And I hope you can spend some evening time outside looking up and taking some time to marvel at what is going on up there. It is quite miraculous, and it still influences so much of what we do down here. Do have a safe, warm, happy, love and light filled holiday season, however you celebrate it. Let there be light and let it be good.