As 2022 comes to a close, I am surrounded by dreary skies and drizzling rain. I somehow ended up coming to California for a family visit and running into rain. In Southern California. The land of eternal bloody sunshine.
Either way, in the grand scheme of thing, the end of one year and a start of another is a somewhat arbitrary date on the calendar.
It took a little time for the Western World to settle on January 1st as the start of the New Year and many other cultures do it differently. For Jews (although we are generally happy to celebrate anything festive), the New Year is essentially a harvest holiday, so new year starts in the fall. It is right around the autumnal equinox when day and night are about the same length in the fall. Chinese New Year is sort of a "start of the spring" thing that is typically around the end of January, but they have a complicated lunisolar calendar that I have not looked into in any detail. I glanced at it briefly and it looks like the New Year is either 3rd of 4th new moon after the winter solstice. I'll be damned if I know why. I made a note to do some research, but if you have any insight, please enlighten me. Our New Year, the way we know it, started in the early days of the Roman empire even before the foundation of the republic. As I understand it, the date did not really stick originally and it moved back and forth a few times between January 1st and March 25th or, roughly, between just after winter solstice when the day is shortest and vernal equinox when the day and the night are of the same duration in the spring.
January 1st became somewhat more official in the days of Julius Caesar a few decades BCE when the Julian calendar was introduced. It lasted for about 500 years until the fall of the Roman Empire. After that, most Christian countries reverted back to either December 25th or March 25th as the celebration of the New Year. During the 16th Century when Gregorian calendar was introduced to fix a few issues with the Julian day keeping, Catholic nations switched to it almost immediately. Non-catholic Western nations took a bit longer. Britain and its colonies, for example, went Gregorian in mid-18th century.
Russia, naturally, adopted the most bass-ackwards approach yet (with a possible exception of the Chinese approach that I have not yet figured out). Technically, Eastern Orthodox church counts its adherence to the Julian calendar from the council of Nicea, although the split between different branches of Christianity we have today had not yet happened. Russia, allegedly, adopted Christianity in 988 and the Julian calendar with it... except they celebrated the New Year on March 1st. I am not especially sure why, perhaps because that is around the time when, in Russia's heartland, you are so tired of the bloody winter that you need something to look forward to. That's just my theory though. I am sure there was a good explanation, but as far as the official documents were concerned, September 1st was the start of the New Year, while as far as getting hammered was concerned, March 1st was it. In the middle of the 15th century, even the Russians got tired of this nonsense and September 1st became the general purpose New Year, until Peter The Great came to power in late 17th century, spent a few years in Europe and discovered that Gregorian calendar seems to work pretty well without any extra days or other unnatural exertions. He switched the New Year to January 1st, primarily for business reasons to match his European trading partners. Russian Orthodox church, however, viewed the Gregorian calendar as a secret plot by those damn catholics to subvert the purity of the orthodox religious experience, so they stayed with a version of the Julian calendar. Russia was still out of sync with Europe, but in a less screwy way. They were only off by a couple of weeks which is "practically on time" by russian standards.
In 1918, a couple of months after the Communists came to power, they noted that the world-wide revolution might not happen on time if the calendars do not match. Communists took an equally dim view of both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, but changing the calendar in the rest of the world was a little far fetched even for them. With that in mind, in 1918, they informed the enlightened citizens of the Soviet Union
that January 31st (old style) is to be followed by February 14th (new style). The enlightened did not mind and the unenlightened did not care enough about those two lost weeks to risk getting shot. Eastern Orthodox church was suppressed, but not dead, so it assumed that the whole Gregorian calendar thing is a plot by both Catholics and Communists and stuck to their own significant dates, except very quietly and without attracting unwanted attention from the Commissariat.
To date, Russian Christmas is about a week after the New Year. I am sure there is a good reason for it, but I am not even going to try to reason what it is.
I am equally happy to celebrate the New Year, Rosh Hashanah and Christmas whenever they happen to fall. They are pretty festive holidays and I like the joyous spirit. Rosh Hashanah has some measure of religious significance for me, while January 1st is the New Year I grew up with. However, this is one of those rare cases where I truly do not discriminate.
Why is any of this important? It isn't. I just find this whole historical calendar mess amusing and I promised to not talk about politics until the new year. This way, I can take a dig at Russia without getting political.
May you all have a Happy New Year! Let's hope and pray that 2023 is a less screwy year for all of us than 2022 was on both micro and macro scales.
