Not placing new years on the solstice directly gives you the opportunity to get the solstice kick off an interval of festivals/celebration culminating in a new years celebration.<p>Ancient people (just like us) certainly enjoyed having multi days of festivals/holidays strung together.<p>The choice of putting the astronomical point at the start or end of the period seems pretty arbitrary (for example, Chinese New Years starts on the new moon, and the lantern festival wraps it all up later on the full moon), but I suspect the "death/rebirth" symbolism of winter solstice strongly biases it towards being more suitable as the start of a celebratory interval, rather than end.<p>A quick, sloppy scan of new year traditions around the world on wikipedia seems to imply that many customs that start their year on/around the spring equinox have new year kick off the interval.
Iran (and some neighbors) starts the new year on the Spring Equinox, the first day of spring. It’s named Now Ruz which translates to new day. Kinda makes sense to kick off the year at spring. It’s also pretty precise give that it’s an astronomical event. It dates back to at least Zoroastrian times (15th century BCE).<p>All the equinoxes and solstices are celebrated there. The winter solstice is named Yalda Night, which was a few nights ago and Christmas may be related to this astronomical event. There is also Mehran and Tirgan. Ancients did like to get together and party.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowruz" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowruz</a><p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yald%C4%81_Night" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yald%C4%81_Night</a>
The way I heard it, the move from Mar to Jan was not for political reasons, but for tax reasons.<p>Spring makes sense for starting a new year; rebirth and all that. But it's lousy as the start of a tax year: who's to say whether all the new animals in the herds got born last year, and are already taxable, or this year, and are not?<p>Start your tax year in the middle of winter, however, (like astronomers used to switch days at noon instead of at midnight) and all is good: no livestock is getting born midwinter so the only fuzziness left is did that sheep die this tax year or last? Much more legible.
Does anybody know the year for this? I put 2018 above because of <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190513173414/https://gist.github.com/joyeusenoelle/3754e00a37fe81aa43aad3eb9543f3ce" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://web.archive.org/web/20190513173414/https://gist.gith...</a>.
People originally regarded spring as the start of a new cycle, and that comes a bit later. Like when the snow melts, frost thaws and new plants start shooting up. The first month was originally March. The names September, October, November and December refer to the seventh, eight, ninth and tenth months.
> they got ¾ of the way through February, got bored, and decided to do something else for a month and come back later.<p>I'm often the same way. After Presidents Day (US) I want to skip ahead to spring.
Hogmanay (New Year's Eve) falls just after the day with the latest sunrise.<p>In the days before everyone had clocks and calendars, perhaps this was be easier to determine than the shortest day.
> Then they got lazy and just numbered the months.<p>* Chinese et al have entered the chat<p>This pattern is fairly common around the world.<p>It's amusing to me that in the Western world, the original Latin designations are off by two as we moved the start month but never adjusted the corresponding month numbers (so DECember (10) = 12, etc).
Would be awesome if more would start celebrating the winter solstice again instead of Christmas.<p>It would unite us more and based on science and not on some arbitrary thoughts.<p>So in the spirit of it: happy winter solstice everyone! (I know I'm 2 days late)
It's fun to laugh at this, but they made the system we still use. We still cling on to the stupid and useless concept of months. They fixed their stupid calendar. We cling on to it.
The impulse to chop up life into neat and rounded boxes is one of the most annoying and pernicious. Also the jarring rationalistic condescension towards millennia of evolving norms of time keeping. If only this guy was in charge of our lives, how neat and rational everything would be!