January First and the Calendar
Happy New Year!
Fasti Praenestini, calendar of Verrius Flaccus. From Palestrina, National Roman Museum, Palazzo, Massimo alle Terme, Wikimedia Commons.
I like to think of our calendar as a jumbled mix of layers from the past. Think of the months of September, October, November and December. The names point to the seventh (sept) eighth (oct), ninth (nov) and tenth (dec) months. But we all know that those months are our current ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth months. What happened? And when?
Human calendars keep track of the passage of time. The calendar evokes the call (same root word from Latin) about the moon’s phases. In the past, we watched those phases of the moon (etymologically linked to our word for month) which are 29.53 days. Our days, however, are based on the sun, from high noon to high noon, equaling one day. It’s also the reason why there is no 12 p.m. (post meridian) or 12 a.m. (ante meridian), only 12:00 noon. Our mechanical clock measuring has made us forget high noon. (I digress.) The jumbled layer begins with the different cycles of the moon’s orbit around the earth, the earth’s rotation on its axis, and the earth’s orbit around the sun. The layers of calendar keeping become very more jumbled with our cultural and language differences, plus the constant changes over time.
Notice on my Compostela from the Dean of the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, the year in Latin, 2024, is Anno Domini.
Muslims keep a different calendar, based on Muhammad’s hijra. The Chinese also kept a calendar based on imperial dynasties. Our Common Era (C.E.) calendar derives from the Roman calendar, plus the Christian time of the Year of Our Lord (A.D. is the acronym Anno Domini, Latin for “Year of Our Lord”). World History textbooks typically integrate the calendars into C.E. and B.C.E. (Before the Common Era, somewhat similar to B.C. Before Christ).
The layers get jumbled even more with names – like the names for our months. September, October, November and December were the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth months in the Roman calendar, but the two winter periods of January and February were added while March remained the first month of the calendar year. When March is the first month, then September, October, November and December are in the right numerical order.
On this first day of the year 2025 of our common era, I wish you a Happy New Year. I also recommend reading Stephen Jay Gould’s 1997 book, Questioning the Millennium; A Rationalist’s Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown.
