January 1, 2024: Deconstructing the New Year

It’s a new year, a new beginning, a fresh start and all those cliches.  It’s a cold slap in the face after last night when you celebrated and then made that resolution while licking the wassail bowl dry.  You don’t remember?  Your resolution went something like this:  I hereby resolve to read Wretched Richard’s Almanac every day so that I might be well informed, sophisticated and attractive. And I will recommend it to all my friends so they too might be well informed, sophisticated and attractive.

Here Come Januarius

As we previously pointed out, today is January 1, New Year’s Day, the start of a brand new year. It wasn’t always thus. There wasn’t always a January. According to legend, the first calendar was created by Romulus who along with his twin brother Uncle Remus founded Rome. This calendar had only ten months (these were leaner times), the ten being Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Innius, Quintilis, Sextilis, Aquarius, Donner, Blitzen, and the ever-popular Decembris.

The year consisted of only 298 regularly scheduled calendar days. The authorities would add bonus days here and there as they saw fit to bring the total number to the magic 365. (Martius 3, a Tuesday, will be postponed so we can bring you a special wear-a-toga-to-work day. Martius 3 will return on Thursday.)

A fellow by the name of Numa Pompilius (no need to memorize his name)  succeeded Romulus who had murdered Uncle Remus in a typically Roman display of sibling rivalry.   In an effort to Make Rome Great Again, Pompilius added two months to the Roman calendar. The first of these was Januarius, dedicated to the two-faced god Janus, the deity who presided over doors, looking back through the doorway to the past and ahead to the future. Clever, what?

More Wolf-monat, Van Helsing?

The Saxons (the Almanac is a big tent, they’re welcome too) didn’t hold much with naming things after Roman gods. They had a different and more colorful name for the month of January — Wolf-monat or Wolf-month, because Saxon folks were more likely to be devoured by wolves during Wolf-monat than at any other time of the year.  But we digress.

Et Tu, Sosigenes

Even though Januarius was added some 600 years earlier, New Year’s Day was celebrated on Januarius 1 for the first time in 45 B.C. On that day the Julian calendar went into effect — created by Julius Caesar himself — with the aid of his trusty sidekick Sosigenes, an Alexandrian astronomer.

Sosigenes advised Caesar to dump the whole Roman calendar and start from scratch. New Year’s no longer came in March. A one-time bonus of 67 days was thrown in, with the promise of an extra day every four years in February.

But Caesar couldn’t stop there. In 44 B.C. (that’s a year later than 45), he changed the month of Quintilis to Julius (July, to friends). He would no doubt have done more damage had not a group of noble Romans assassinated him that same year.  But didn’t Augustus come along and keep fiddling with the calendar. (There’s something about Caesars and fiddling.). Sextilis became (what else?) Augustus. But it only had 30 days, compared to Julius’ 31.  What’s a Roman emperor to do?  Steal a day from Februarius, of course.

. . .And on the Eighth Day

For those folks who just can’t get enough ’tis the season, today is also the eighth of a dozen days of Christmas.  This is infamously celebrated by the carol in which on this day, the first day of Christmas, someone’s True Love bestows upon him or her a gift of a partridge in a pear tree.  While we might point out that a crock pot or a circular saw would be a bit more practical, we won’t quibble with the sentiment.  A flock followed: turtle doves, French hens, colly birds, geese, swans, all calling, clucking, cooing and squawking around that pear tree.

But now on the eighth day, True Love, having at last run out of feathered friends, has created an entirely new category of giving — the gift of people. The first contribution to this premise consists of eight maids a-milking, a lovely gift with nary a cackle or a caw. Of course this requires the addition of cows — one can’t very well expect the recipient to go out and find his or her own cows (True Love could have added a disclaimer of cows not included, but that would be a cheap trick.) We suppose there might be just one cow with all the maids milking it, but that would be one very sore cow.

Charles Dickens, it would seem, missed the Christmas boat by failing to take advantage of this twelve day gimmick.  Imagine if you will the twelve ghosts of Christmas.