Frazz by Jef Mallett for June 02, 2024

It’s all COMPLETELY arbitrary. Heck there are various ways of deciding what months there are, how long they last, and when they start relative to the fixed points of solstices and equinoxes. Some calendars are based on lunar cycles, most on the solar year… and there are or were some even more arcane systems. Heck even “our own” calendar has been changed from the Roman 10-month system to our current 12… and the Roman new year was celebrated near the ides of March.

My own favorite calendrical fantasy is to add another month so we have 13 months each exactly 28 days long, with an extra day added “somewhere” (probably as new years day) that’s not in the monthly calendar… and another leap day, also not inside the system every four years (approximately). With a little care, most holidays could be celebrated on a long weekend… and it could be the SAME long weekend every year.

Yeah, yeah: dream on. But I think it would be nicer than what we have… if it could happen by some miracle.

His classmates are on the ball. Nice.

So make June resolutions. Too hard to think of that, kid?

The better question, If AD is the number of years since Christ’s birth, why doesn’t the new year start on Christmas?

In pagan Northern Europe, when the days were shortest and there was no certainty that they would lengthen, the new year started when the days were getting longer and new life was starting, so hope was growing; if the New Year started in June, the reverse would be happening and there would be no reason to celebrate. In Anglo-Saxon England ‘Gēol’ (pronounced ‘Yule’) was the first day after the winter solstice that was perceptively longer and hence the celebration that Christianity stole. In the Anglo-Saxon calendar, our December was ‘Ærra Gēola’, which means ‘before Yule’. Our December 24th was Modraniht (Mother’s Night), where the Mothers, the female ancestral spirits that watched over their families were worshipped. Our January was called ‘Æfterra Gēola’ (after Yule’).

You start the new year full of ambition, and then six months in when you’ve run out of motivation along comes June to “(make) you want to become your best possible self”. You need to play the long game, kid.

There are lots of good ‘decision’ days. Vernal equinox, summer solstice, autumnal equinox, winter solstice. Who needs the calendar? The sun is a more constant arbiter of passing time.

New year. Fiscal year. New season celebrations. Birthdays. All other anniversaries. At our leisure, with just a bit of effort. Many with appropriate foods.

Yawn

It used to be March 25. It still is in Middle Earth.

Calendars and New Year’s resolutions are both entirely arbitrary. You could change yourself at any time, and a year could just as easily start in June as in January. These are just more things that we do because “we’ve always done it this way”.

So?

The resigned look on Mrs. Olsen’s face, priceless!

Like making January and May, for example, 30 days and adding those two days to February to even things out. Oh, yeah, but then where would we put Leap Day, in April?

In India, there are a multitude of calendars, most of which start the year in April, all on the same day or within days of each other. Spring time.

I celebrate the New Year on the first day of spring. I take the day off and do something outdoors no matter how dam cold it is. I used to walk on the beach, but that’s not practical here.

For me the year has always started in September, with new pencils and notebooks!

Starting the new year in January DOES make sense, though. You’re about eight days out from the Solstice, which means it just started lightening up in the Northern Hemisphere. It doesn’t work that well in the Southern, though.

No no no, you absolutely don’t want that. If it were so, Christmas vacation would end a week earlier and you’d be back in school on December 26. You’d lose a week of vacation to gain one day.

Also, ‘June Is Bustin’ Out All Over!’ according to the musical Carousel. Rogers and Hammerstein, they were so good.

Used to be March 25 a few centuries back, the new year.

As I pointed out to my wife yesterday (and got a “Oh hush!”) the days start getting SHORTER in June. (June 21, or thereabouts, to be precise.) The winter solstice is the point where they start to get LONGER i.e. a return of hope and life. But for some really bad calendar management, the new year would start on the solstice.

Until 153 BCE, the Roman year started on March 1.