New Year's Day History You May Have Not Heard

Added: 10/26/2007

New Year's Day happens exactly one week after Christmas Day and it marks the beginning of the new year on the Gregorian calendar. It is treated like a holiday in most countries and the new year is rung in with singing, celebration, and grand fireworks shows. But New Year's Day was not always January 1 and it was not always treated with such light celebration and revelry.

When you are speaking about New Year's Day history you are, of course, going to get into a discussion of the different types of calendars used throughout history. The first instances of celebrating the turn of the new year seem to be based around the old Roman calendar which existed up until approximately 46BC. During the time of the Roman calendar it was common to celebrate the new year on March 15th which the Romans referred to as the Ides Of March. In New Year's Day history the March 15th date was commonly thought to be a farming milestone when the Romans were ready to plant new crops and bring in the new year of harvest. The Roman calendar fluctuated a lot and March 15th is an approximation based on the current Gregorian calendar but it has held pretty true in New Year's Day history that the Ides Of March were commonly treated as New Year’s Day by the Romans although they never really referred to it in that manner. In 153BC the date was moved to January 1 because that is the date the two main Roman consuls, the highest elected officials in the Roman empire were chosen, were selected by the people and in New Year's Day history the choosing of January 1st was actually a military decision. The consuls had great influence on the army and their selection was of strategic military importance.

The date of January 1st remained even after the Roman calendar was dropped in lieu of the Julian calendar until Dionysius Exiguus set the date of March 25th in 525 AD to commemorate the Annunciation of Jesus. Throughout the Middle Ages the New Year’s Day history gets to be a little clouded as the date was changed to honor different feasts on the Christian calendar. This is how the date was marked for centuries and in the New Year’s Day history between 525AD and approximately 1582AD, the year the Gregorian calendar was officially adopted by Pope Gregory XIII, New Year’s Day had no home on the calendar and it was celebrated at various times throughout the year. The Pope adopting the Gregorian calendar did not mean that the rest of the world automatically followed suit and for many years the new year day changed and it some places it was stationary on one day but it was not January 1st. In England the new year began on March 25th, as decreed by Dionysius Exiguus, until 1752 when they did come to adopt January 1st as the new year date. When the transition was occurring from March 25th, which was used by many countries as the real New Year’s Day, to January 1st the years the changes were made were shortened. So in Scotland, for example, 1599 is a short year because it starts on March 25th and ends on December 31st. This happened a lot during this time when the world was shifting from the Christian calendar marked by religious milestones to the Gregorian calendar which was more based on the solar artithmetic.

As the Gregorian calendar became more widely accepted, and as the new world colonies were being settled, January 1st became the accepted day for the beginning of each new year. Today the celebrations of New Year’s Day are all over the world and even though some societies follow a different calendar, the Jewish people have a different new year on their calendar, the entire world was still able to agree on January 1st as being the real New Year’s Day.

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