Well, Christmas has come and gone. All in all, and only speaking for myself, it wasn’t a bad holiday. The celebrations were festive, people seemed to be in a cheerful mood, and the museum decorations were a big hit. My only regret is that Christmas was a little on the brown side. I guess I’m one of those hopeless types that likes a little cold and snow for the holiday season. At any rate, aside from the weather, it was a great Christmas.
With the “big” holiday over, it’s time again to look forward to the new year. Jan. 1 marks the beginning of 2024. Aside from the fact that this will be an election year filled with heated political debate, the start of a new year is always one filled with hope — hope of a good year, of good health and of course, good tidings. It’s a tradition that humans have practiced for centuries. One has to wonder, however, why our celebration is on Jan. 1, and why our hope for good fortune dawns on that day. After all, isn’t every day the dawn of a new year? As usual, an answer can almost always be found by looking at history.
While Jan. 1 is the traditional start of the New Year, it wasn’t always that way. Various cultures have celebrated the start of the year at different times throughout history. At some unknown point in time ancient humans began keeping track of days gone by. This of course evolved into the calendar which, of course, has a starting and ending point for each year. If I had to wager a guess, I’d say the first “New Year” came at a time when people living in the Fertile Crescent first developed agriculture — roughly around the end of the last ice age. Most historians agree that this is precisely the point in history when prehistoric civilizations began arranging rocks into lunar calendars, like Stonehenge, that could track time by observing the position of the stars. Using these early “calendars,” farmers knew exactly when the planting season could begin. One could then surmise that the start of a new year was probably celebrated in the spring when the new planting season arrived.
The first “modern” calendars, and I use the term modern loosely, started being developed around 2,000 B.C. when civilizations in the Middle East began arranging the days into months, and the months into weeks. Each month began with a new moon and most people marked the spring equinox as the start of the new year. Throughout the next 2,000 years, different civilizations and cultures created their own calendars, yet these were mostly uniform with 10-12 months and 354-365 days in a year that culminated in spring.
The first recorded New Year celebration in January began around 45 B.C. by the Romans. Traditionally, the Romans used a 10-month calendar with the new year beginning in March. When Julius Caesar took power, however, he instituted the Julian Calendar with a start date of Jan. 1 — this became the most common calendar used throughout the Roman Empire for centuries to follow.
The Julian Calendar may have been the “official” calendar of Rome, yet not everyone within the empire followed it as written. Christian Romans chose to celebrate the New Year on Dec. 25, marking the birth of Jesus as the start of the new year. It wasn’t until 336 A.D. when Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, that most Roman Christians adopted Jan. 1 as New Year’s Day.
Most of Europe readily adopted the Julian Calendar, yet some areas still refused to deviate from their ancient New Year’s celebrations during spring. It wouldn’t be until the 16th century for the German states, the Netherlands, and France to adopt the Jan. 1 celebration. In addition, the Scots would not adopt the holiday until 1752.
While not all cultures adopt Jan. 1 as the start of the year, most do. For us, the new year is just days away. Many will gather together as they did a week prior for Christmas — this time, however, to ring in a new year. It’s unknown how long this trend will continue. If history has shown us anything, it’s that some future civilization will look back on our time and wonder why we chose Jan. 1 as our New Year’s holiday. Until then, hum a few bars of “Auld Lang Syne,” and we’ll c-ya next year!
— Brian Haines is executive director of the McLeod County Historical Society and Museum, 380 School Road N.W., Hutchinson. Do you have a historical anecdote to share? Haines can be reached at 320-587-2109, or by email at director@mcleodhistory.org.
