Happy New Year!

Calendar Schmalendar!

Today is January 1^st. Actually I am writing this over three days starting on December 30^th and it won’t be posted on this site until 4:00 a.m. on January 2^nd and goodness knows when you are reading it – assuming anyone is actually reading it.

There is this day called New Year’s, on a 12 month calendar, the first day of the first month. January is named for Janus, the Roman two-visaged god of beginnings, looking back to the old year and forward to the new. As far as I know human beings are the only animals who mark time in this way. According to scientists’ observations, most animals mark time around their reproductive cycles. Maybe mayflies and elephants have a different sense of time from each other and from us.

We humans, mostly, mark time by days, months, years (and hours, minutes, seconds nanoseconds and centuries). For quite some time, people have been marking months and days in a calendar. Every year my wife gives me a wall calendar with interesting pictures and my nephew and his wife send me one with Japanese woodcut prints that sits on my desk. This keeps me on track in retirement where every today is like yesterday and/or tomorrow. Appointments, both for me and Billie, go into our laptop calendars and into our phones, so we don’t schedule colonoscopies that conflict with dentist appointments. There is probably a synching technology to make that process easier, but my “late-adopter” persona hasn’t discovered it yet.

The first calendar (that we know of) dates to about 8000 BCE and was discovered in 2004 by archaeologists digging in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. It is a series of rocks and pots in the ground from which one can track the movement of the sun and moon, a luni-solar calendar. The calendar aligns with the winter solstice sunrise so day markings can be corrected once a year. Most calendars in use today are either lunar like the Chinese and Jewish calendars or solar like the twelve month Gregorian one that we use.

Our current calendar was created for Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 CE, because the previous calendar invented by Sosigenes for Julius Caesar in 40 BCE lost 11 minutes a year and so by the sixteenth century was off by about ten days. The Julian calendar itself was created because the previous Roman Republic calendar, supposedly created by Romulus in 738 BCE was off by three months. I don’t know what that did for colonoscopy scheduling, but it apparently messed up sowing and reaping crops.

What’s in a date?

We say it is January 1 and most of the world abides by the Gregorian calendar so you don’t show up for the United Nations twelve days late, but for religious celebrations and for New Year’s, well everyone does their own thing.

Eastern Orthodox Christians in Greece, Serbia, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, and Georgia keep the Julian calendar for religious celebrations. Former Byzantines didn’t buy some Roman pope’s idea. January 1 is a saints day part of advent of Christmas, celebrated on January 6^th or 7th. There isn’t a Eastern religious New Year’s celebration, but some observe New Year’s on January 14^th.

The Chinese New Year is based upon a lunar calendar and so it moves around between January 21^st  and February 20^th.  It is February 10^th in 2024.The Korean Seolial is celebrated the same day as is the Vietnamese Tét Nguyên Dán. The Japanese Shōgatsu is  a multi-day festival that has been celebrated on January1st  since 1873, during the Westernization of the Meiji period.

Many peoples celebrate the New Year in the spring, which makes sense to me, new growth, new year. Nyepi, the Balinese New Year, Nowruz, the Iranian New Year are celebrated in March. Vikram Sawant, the Hindu New Year is also a March holiday, (though I’ve been told that some Hindus celebrate Diwali, the fall festival of light as New Years; some celebrate in the spring. “It depends on where your family is from”). Buddhists in Thailand and India celebrate Songkran in April close to the New Year’s celebrations of Tamils (Puthandu) and Sri Lankan Sinhalese (Aluth Arevudda).

The Muslim Hijri celebrates the journey of the prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medini. The sacred month of Muharrum is determined on a lunar calendar and celebrated differently by Shia and Sunni Muslims.

Fall New Years include the ancient Celtic Samhain (November1), Rosh Hashanna, The Jewish New Year (October 2-4, 2024), Enkutatash, the Ethiopian New Year, (September 11) and Western Australia Aboriginal Murador New Year (October 30).

It’s all in the superstitions and traditions?

There are many superstitions and traditions for the New Year around the world. My mother served a meal of salmon for wisdom, rice for riches, cornbread for the golden glow of happiness, black-eyed peas for peace, and greens for growth. (We usually had kale or spinach, because you couldn’t find the collards of my mom’s Alabama youth in New England.). My father always said “what you do on New Year’s day you will do throughout the year.” I remember him writing a letter to his sister in Florida when long distance phone calls were too expensive. I try to talk with each of my children spread across the United States on New Year’s Day.

First footings in Scotland (first across your threshold in the New Year) dictates the year and he or she better bring coal, salt or whiskey. Brazilians wear white and jump in the ocean. The Spanish eat grapes. Italians wear red underwear. Japanese eat soba noodles. In Denmark I’ve heard they smash plates. Bread and salt seem to be important in a lot of places, as do apples, dates, pomegranates and various fruits.

Regrets, reflections, and re-visions

Amid the laughs, libations, and general frivolity, however, many cultures have a sober, somber side to the passing of the old year and welcoming of the new. Some see the old-year-new-year transition as a time to reconnect with ancestors especially those lost in the old year.

The ancient Celts viewed Samhain as a time when the spirits of the dead roamed freely between the Otherworld and our own, which is why we have ghosts on Halloween and why the Church coopted the holiday to All Hallows Eve a time to pay respect to your forebearers and the saints. All Saints Day, November 1 was to be spent in church praying, which probably curtailed some old Celt carousing the night before. Even the Robert Burns song, based upon a Scots folk hymn, which we sing at the stroke of midnight, faking the lyrics we’ve forgotten or never knew, has  roots in respecting memories of the “old long since gone:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot

And never brought to mind

Should auld acquaintance be forgot

And days of auld lang syne

For auld lang syne, my dear

For auld lang syne

We’ll take a cup of kindness yet

For auld lang syne.

It’s like the toast, ‘To absent friends.” We remember.

The night before we Caucasians show up in Chinatown for the rice cakes, dumplings, dragon dances and fireworks, a Chinese family makes offerings to ancestors and gathers for a family reunion dinner. In Chile, some celebrate New Year’s Eve in a cemetery saying goodbye again to family.

It is a time of saying goodbye. Even American broadcast news has a segment In Memoriam to those we lost this year. This year that list included singers Harry Belafonte and Tony Bennett and a segment on Friends TV show star, Matthew Perry, “much loved and gone too soon.”

Many of us take stock of the previous year, and our lives to date at New Years. We are where we are as a consequence of decision and actions we made in the past. Some of us are reasonably happy about those consequences; some are feel less sanguine about where our previous selves have dumped us.

January is always the biggest sale month for health club memberships. Workout rooms are full all month. Drinkers of alcohol, especially those who partied a bit too much on New Year’s Eve, join the “Dry January” movement. Many set New Year’s resolutions about working harder, or smarter, spending more time with family, losing a few pounds, or being more positive. I don’t mean to denigrate such efforts; many succeed in improving their lives this way and I believe in improvement.

When I have failed at New Year’s resolutions, it was because I had a result-goal without a corresponding process to achieve it, including milestone measures and planned contingencies when things didn’t go quite as planned. My life is on a pretty even keel right now. Sure, I need to take off the holiday weight, but I know how to do that: Eat less, move more stay out of the Hãagen-Dazs. I can get a little less depressed about politics and a little  more active in the causes and candidates I believe in; 2024 is a big political year in the U.S.

We have much to do together starting this year, but ending war, world poverty, hunger and homelessness, and slowly climate change are all disconnected goals without a clear corresponding process to achieve them.  Let us start by listening with care, even while we stand up to hate, do so with love. Think Big – start small. Darkness gives way to light; be a candle.

I’m going to work on that – and taking small actions. I’m a writer; I’ll write about my progress.

What about you? How do you re-envision yourself and your contribution to the general good this year?