It’s January First, so Happy 2022! The even-numbered years are always better, you know. This is a reminder I always mention on every other New Year’s Day. On the alternates, everybody gets the somewhat similar message that “the odd-numbered years are always better.” Just goes to show that you really can’t rely on anything I have to say.
It’s important to begin a year on a positive, hopeful note — people have known this since about 45 BCE, which is where we got January 1 as the start of the year. That was the day the Roman Empire adopted the Julian calendar, which placed the year’s beginning on January 1. Before that, the Roman calendar was, to put it mildly, very complicated. For one thing, they had an extra month they squeezed in between February and March, except not every time. The years were sometimes 355 days long, but could last 377 or 378 days. And to make it worse, they didn’t even have a predictable system for when the changes would be inserted into the year; the high priests would just make a declaration, and there it was. Since the priests, or “potifices,” were only human, it often turned out that they paid close attention to politics. The lawmakers (“magistrates”) served for one year at a time. So what happened was that when a magistrate who the pontifices liked happened to be in office, the year turned out to be longer! Just a coincidence, I’m sure.
It’s probably not a coincidence that a great many heads of state have come into power on various editions of January 1. After all, you want to start the year on a high note, right? So sure enough, everybody from Pertinax getting named Roman Emperor by the senate in the year 193 (an office he reportedly didn’t want) to two different Kings of Hungary being crowned in 1001 and 1438, to Charles II becoming King of Scotland, these and more all happened on January 1.
But there’s a funny thing about that Charles II crowning. It happened on January 1, 1651, when Charles was about 20. But just a few of decades before he was born, January 1 was not the beginning of the year in Scotland. Before that the Scottish year started on March 25, so when folks like Robert the Bruce became King of the Scots in 1306, he was crowned on New Years Day — March 25. But anyway, as of 1600 even Scotland fell in line and celebrated the New Year on the same day as everybody else.
They added some days (either 5 or 6, depending on that leap year thing) at the end of the year.
If we’re looking into calendars, though, there’s another January 1 of calendaric note: the one in 1806. That was when the French Republican Calendar was abolished and France joined Scotland and the rest in using the good old Gregorian calendar we rely on today. The French Republican calendar was a political document created in the French Revolution. It placed the first day of the year on September 22, because that was the date the new Republic was proclaimed. It divided each of the 12 months into three ten-day weeks. That didn’t add up to a whole year, so they added some days (either 5 or 6, depending on that leap year thing) at the end of the year and called them “complementary days.”
The French were not the first to do this; the ancient Egyptian calendar used the same system. The really unusual part of the Republican calendar was in the way it handled individual days; each was divvied up according to the decimal system. Thus there were ten hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour, and 100 seconds in a minute. They even manufactured clocks using this scheme, but hours and minutes were so ingrained in people’s thinking that decimal time never caught on. Anyway, as mentioned, Napoleon came along in 1806, dissolved the Republic by becoming Emperor, and the Republican Calendar was abolished on the first of January. Well, okay, it was almost abolished. It returned briefly in 1871 in the Paris Commune, but that was it.
There’s another time-related January 1 event worth mentioning. That happened in 1885, when the first 25 nations adopted the proposal for “standard time” and “time zones,” and time began to make a bit more sense if you were traveling internationally. Oh, and I almost forgot: January 1, 1970 was the beginning of Unix time, when every computer in the world that uses an operating system in the Unix family (and that’s probably most of them), started counting time at 00:00:00.
If you look at the whole scope of dealing with time and dates from the Romans onward, many of the things we’d call “progress” had to do with fixing problems that came from having no good way of disseminating news and information consistently and regularly throughout a country or region. Just think about the original Roman system; if you’re going to have some official just deciding things like how long a year is, it would be very helpful to have something like, I dunno, maybe a newspaper. Those came along later, but became pretty significant. That’s why when you’re reading about the history of a given day, you might find mention of January 1, 1788 as the date the very first edition of the London Times was published. Or, to be honest, you might not see it; not all of these book-of-days things do a thoroughgoing job of research, you know. My advice is to stick with a quality ones if you can find it.
When you think of newspapers called The Times, there are probably two that occur to most people: the one in London and the New York Times. And if you’re thinking I’m about to tell you that the New York Times also published its first edition on some January 1, you’re sadly mistaken. It isn’t the New York Times that has an important January 1 connection; it’s New York itself! It came into the form we know today on January 1, 1898 when the “City of Greater New York” was formed, including the familiar boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens (Staten Island was added a few months later). “New York” already existed, of course, but it didn’t include all the territory it has today, and some of what are now boroughs were either counties or separate cities. So if you watched the Times Square ball drop last night to ring in the new year, you were looking at a place that January 1 made possible. In a way, at least.
New York is a center of global finance, of course, and you can’t avoid that topic when you’re talking about January 1, either. One of the world’s major currencies, the Euro, was first introduced on January 1, 1999. It seems like it’s been around longer than that, doesn’t it? Besides that, the World Trade Association was formed on a January 1, too. In this case, in 1995.
I’m really just skimming past most of these events, as you’ve probably noticed. You can look up all the details on the Internet — but that’s only because of January 1, 1983. That’s when the original ARPANET adopted the new TCP/IP protocol and the Internet came into existence. Everyone, including Canadian citizens, cheered Well, okay, they probably didn’t notice, but I needed an awkward segue into Canada, because it wasn’t until January 1, 1947 that there was any such thing as a Canadian citizen. That was the day the Canadian Citizenship Act took effect, and all the former “British subjects” who lived in Canada suddenly became citizens. They may not all have noticed that, either.
One thing people do notice, though, is a new member of the family, and there are quite a few people you’ve heard of who were born on January 1. If you’re from the US, or interested in its colonial-era history, you’ve heard of Paul Revere and Betsy Ross. Both January 1 babies, in 1735 and 1752 respectively. Then a baby was born on January 1, 1803 and christened “Edward” — he grew up to be Edward Dickinson, whose daughter Emily wrote some stuff you may have read, or even seen on a screen. There are loads of screens in the US that are sometimes (or, for whatever reason, nearly always) tuned to Fox News. That’s part of what’s now the Fox Corporation, along with Fox Sports and the 20th Century Fox movie studio. The whole operation was founded in 1915 by William Fox, who was born on January 1, 1879.
So January 1 is a birthday for a few, but it’s a holiday for everybody. It’s New Year’s Day, and it’s also Emancipation Day in the US and other nations, in celebration of the end of slavery. The festival in Montserrat is called Jump-up Day, and it’s the final day of Carnival as well as a celebration of emancipation. Different countries obviously have their own holidays, and maybe you can infer something about a nation from its holidays. For instance, I’m not drawing any conclusions here, but in Tanzania today is National Tree Planting Day, while in the US it’s Bloody Mary Day. Celebrating the drink. Which you might need if you participate in Polar Bear Plunge Day, which is (1) also today, (2) involves swimming in very cold water, and (3) is a holiday I’m not going to be celebrating.
Happy 2022 everybody!
