The New Year begins on January 1st. This is a fact for us and is not least reflected in the balance sheets of the fitness studios every year. But once you start thinking about this inevitable fact, you realize just how random this date actually is. The turn of the year could just as well take place on any other day of the year. Exactly when one year ends and the next begins doesn't really matter. Accordingly, it will probably not surprise you when I tell you today:New Year's Eve and New Year's were celebrated on completely different days in history! The transition between the years was actually committed very early on. This ancient origin, with its many detours to today's holiday, also makes New Year's such an extraordinary and fascinating holiday. So who invented the New Year in January and what came before it?
We need to talk about calendars
Before we can really delve into this story, though, we need to ask an even more fundamental question:why is there a new year in the first place? After all, the end of the year is not a real event that we can follow in nature. At least not directly. As humanity, we first had to invent the concept of a calendar in order for the turn of the year to make any sense at all. Without digressing too deeply, it can be said here that people in the past invented two basic types of calendars and used them to structure their year. First came the lunar calendar. Because people noticed early on that the moon moved in phases and that the time between two full moons was regularly around 30 days. The first humans possibly oriented themselves to this even before they settled down. The resulting lunar cycles were soon given names and it is therefore no coincidence that the word "month" in German also comes from "moon".
But there is a little problem with these lunar calendars. Because a lunar cycle around the earth does not last exactly 30 days, but rather 29.5 and a few crushed ones. This means that if you only orientate yourself on this in a culture, at some point the seasons will get mixed up. If we had a purely lunar calendar today, January would have wandered into the astronomical summer and back again several times. Not very useful if you want to use it to calculate harvest time and other important data. That's why solar calendars were added at some point. Some clever people noticed from the wandering constellations that the year could be broken down into about 365 days. At the latest since ancient Greece, new calendar systems have been devised on this basis. The months were adjusted in length so that they ended up being an astronomical year. More or less at least. But the question still arises:When should such a year begin and end?
Is there a logical date for the New Year?
In Graeco-Roman times (but also before that), most advanced cultures switched to some form of calculated calendar system. The years were no longer calculated purely by observation, but mathematically in order to get as close as possible to the course of the seasons. Well and good, so the calendars got better. But when did these people celebrate the New Year? Again, while this varied from culture to culture, there were obvious candidates for the New Year, and no:none of those dates were January 1st. If you are already looking for a day for the beginning of the year, the astronomical fixed dates are a good choice:the equinoxes (what a wonderful German word ...) in spring and autumn, for example, or of course the summer and winter solstices. That would certainly be the most consistent solution. But of course the ancient Romans came up with another one at some point. And of course, today's New Year dates back to the Romans, no matter how illogical their date...
In any case, we still have a lot more to thank the Romans for in this regard. After all, they were also the ones who introduced our current month names and our calendar in and of themselves. For them, the new year began for a long time on March 1st and not on January 1st. That would also have been difficult, because originally the Roman calendar probably only knew ten months, which also explains the confusing names in our current calendar. Sept-ember the seventh, Nov-ember the ninth... A horrible mess created when the Romans had the brilliant idea sometime in the 2nd century BC of simply throwing in two months. Thank you too!
New Year was celebrated in ancient Rome even after that on March 1st. The two extra months were first inserted at the end of the year, not at the beginning. Julius Caesar would change that a hundred years later. He created what is now known as the Julian calendar, starting with January, from the old Roman calendar with the help of Egyptian models. The calendar might look familiar to us otherwise. It consists of 365 days, 12 months and a leap year every four years. This brought Caesar pretty close to the astronomical year. The Roman year was now only about 11 minutes shorter than the orbit of the sun around the earth. But we would quickly get the error under control. Just under 1600 years later in the Gregorian calendar reform.
Between the years...like that?
However, just because the Romans fixed January 1st as their New Year's date doesn't mean it was the norm across Europe from that time on. The Franks really started the new year on March 1st, while in Byzantium September 1st was considered the beginning of the year, as it was considered the day the world came into being. Judaism, on the other hand, did not adopt the Roman-Julian calendar at all, which is why the Jewish lunar calendar still wanders through the year today. The Celts then celebrated their New Year on a very different day, said to be on Samhain in late October, and in much of medieval Europe New Year's dates were usually sometime between the winter solstice, Christmas and January 6th. It was not until the 17th century that the Pope finally decided that the new year should be January 1st for the Catholic world. From now on, New Year's Eve should be celebrated the day before.
The road to the New Year celebrations on January 1st was therefore a very long one. It was not until Roman times that the calendar we know today was developed. It was not until the 16th century that this calendar was adjusted in the Gregorian reform to match the astronomical year. And it took another 100 years longer before the Pope made January 1st the binding date for the New Year. Until then, the New Year could take place on almost any day and varied greatly from area to area. It was sometime between Christmas and the beginning of January, the end of the old year and the beginning of the new year. The idiom "Between the Years" still reflects this confusion to this day.