The History of New Year

In many places, January 1st is considered New Year’s Day. However, was it always that way? And how did a year come to be 365 days?

In China, New Year is according to the Lunar Calendar, which falls somewhere between January 21st and February 20th. In countries using the Gregorian Calendar, December 31st is the last day of the year. However, New Year’s Day has a pretty complicated history, and today, let’s dive into this mess to figure it out!

It all started in Rome, the city which would later become a capital for the Roman Empire. By legend, the first king of Rome, Romulus, wanted a better way to organize celebrations, so he devised a system to mark days. It was a lunar calendar based on the movements of the moon. The lunar cycle took 29.5 Earth days to complete. However, that number wasn’t evenly dividable by the year, how long Earth takes to orbit the Sun. Twelve lunar cycles were approximately 11 days shorter than a solar year, so making the calendar in sync with the solar year and the seasons proved hard.

So Roman calendars, as of later description, had ten lunar months, either of 30 or 31 days, leaving a glob of unorganized days into winter. If the months started to feel off with the seasons, they added days until it felt relatively better. They likely celebrated New Year on the vernal equinox, where the Sun just about shines on the equator, making day and night the same length. According to legend, the second king of Rome added two months to the calendar, making the lunar year duration closer to a solar year. Did you know that January got named after Janus, a god with two faces, able to look into the past and future? It made sense to the Romans that the first day of the month named after a god of beginnings and endings should be New Year’s Day.

But that change didn’t happen immediately. Some continued to stick with the equinox as the start of a new year. However, this new calendar still had flaws, and every few years, it was off by a day. So Julius Caesar decided to create the Julian Calendar. Because mathematicians had calculated that a year was about 365.25 days long, they had three years of 365 days. Then on the fourth year, adding up the .25 days together, there was a new day in February, the shortest month in the calendar. But religion decided that January 1st didn’t have any symbolic meaning, and people started making feast days like Easter the start of a year. Some celebrated New Year on December 25th, on the day Jesus was born, putting New Year close to where the Roman calendars had pictured it to be.

January 1st continued to be the civil starting point of a new year. However, the Julian calendar was still slightly off. A year was just a bit shorter than 365.25 days, at 365.24219 days, and the Julian calendar had added too many leap days. So, Pope Gregory, the Thirteenth, created the Gregorian Calendar, which proposed a new formula to calculate leap years. 1. the year had to be divisible by four. 2. If the year is also divisible by 100, it’s not a leap year, unless; 3. the year is a leap year if it’s divisible by 400. This formula makes it more accurate than the Julian calendar and gets commonly used today. However, the Gregorian Calendar would still be off by a day every 3236 years.

So maybe no calendar is the most accurate? You could try inventing your calendar and compete with your friends to see who makes the most accurate. But do make sure that you specify when New Year is. Wouldn’t it be confusing if every day is the start of a new year? Since it was approximately 365 days from that same day last year? That’s the end of this production from the New News Newsminute. Thank you, and happy New Year!