Happy New Year

Here it is, the second last day of the second last year of the first decade of the21st Century. Who would have thought that it would have flown by so fast. This day ten years ago everyone was wondering whether all the world’s computers would crash and send us back into the dark ages. Well, I admit I was hopeful that all would be well, so I hadn’t stocked up with cases of baked beans. Of course nothing happened and I have been a little wary of the panic merchants ever since, but it did highlight our dependence on our little machines – a dependence which has increased rather than decreased over the proceeding ten years.

As I get older the years seem to speed by faster and faster. I have a theory which I believe explains why - when we are one year old a year is all our life, when we are two it is half our life, when we are twenty it is one twentieth and so on. The percentage of life to year is constantly dropping so the years speed up accordingly. Working out why is one thing but seeing that magic date - 1st of January, rushing towards me is something else entirely. I want things to slow down a little. My life is going too fast.

This got me thinking about New Year's Day. I've always known that the calendar is a rather arbitrary thing. It has been fiddled with over the years. In fact January 1st has not always been the first day of the year. More often than not New Year started in March.  Before the British adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, they used two calendar systems. The historical year began on January 1st but the Civil year began on March 25th. It is interesting for family historians because ancestors born between January 1st and March 25th have a double year for their birth date e.g. 2nd February 1717/18 to cover this anomaly. In fact March 25th is a more sensible date as it is considered to be the beginning of Spring - and Spring is the time for renewed growth. January 1st isn't anything really. Many cultures around the world still consider the March date as the logical date for the New Year, especially in the Middle East and India.

Celebrating the New Year in whatever day it is deemed to fall, has a tradition that goes back over 4000 years to the Ancient Babylonians. They celebrated the day on the first New Moon after the Vernal or Autumn Equinox. The Romans originally celebrated the New Year in March and that is why September to December are the 7th to 10th months respectively. But the Romans liked to fiddle with their calendar and before long the calendar had no agricultural significance at all. So Julius Caesar changed the calendar, made January 1st the New Years day, and hey presto we had the Julian calendar. To bring it back into line with the seasons he had to allow that year to run for 445 days. Now the Julian calendar has 365 days but we know that the year is actually 365¼ days. As a result, every four years the calendar became one day behind. Eventually Spring was celebrated in what should have been the Autumn months and the farmers had no idea where they were. So in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII decreed that an extra day would be added to the calendar every four years and to bring the calendar back into line with the seasons he dropped ten days. People went to sleep on 4th October 1582 and woke up on 15th October 1582.  Some sleep what????

Ah time. How fleeting. How confusing. How arbitary.