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Please notice the new icon in the menu area to the right --->. (If you don't see that large black bar with links, etc., you're viewing my blog outside of my web site. Click here to get the whole picture.) That link leads to the United Nation's World Food Programme, which is currently mobilized to send aid to the victims of the recent tsunami. In this season of abundance it behoves us all to consider how we can help those so devastated. The New Year is here. Whee. I'd have a better time celebrating this if it was tied to something. With nothing other than a calendar change, New Year's Day is just any other day. If you only judge the passing of time based on the calendar, then any day can be the start of a new year. There's no real difference, from the solar system's perspective, between January 1st and July 17th. There isn't a huge finish line painted across the Earth's orbit. The only true "starting" moments would be the summer and winter solstices (solsti? solticesesses?) or the spring and fall equinox (equinoxes? equinoxi?). If the calendar started on one of these it'd mean something. As Charles Panati writes in his Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things, "From both an astronomical and an agricultural standpoint, January is a perverse time for symbolically beginning a crop cycle, or a new year." Originally the new year started on the spring equinox, a celebration of the beginning of the harvest. Our current date is the result of Roman officials tampering with the calendar in order to extend their terms in office. After years of such meddling, the calendar got so out whack with astronomical events that the senate eventually had to declare a new New Year...they chose January 1st, for whatever reason. After further tampering Julius Caesar again "corrected" the calendar to start on January 1st. To do so he had to let the year go on for 445 days, which contemporaries called the "Year of Confusion." (If only they knew...) While I could get behind a New Year that started on the spring equinox, it's perhaps more fitting to look beyond even the majesty of the solar system. The liturgical year is based around the two great feasts of Christmas and Easter, the second actually being the more important. Without going into the insanely complex reasons for how the Easter date is calculated every year (mainly because it's still a bit fuzzy for me...I think you need to know algebra) it's at least tied to some event. Something of monumental importance happened on that day. The liturgical year begins with the first Sunday in Advent, four Sundays before Christmas. Christmas, of course, could be celebrated just about any time. December 25th was chosen to compete with pagan solstice festivals, and is thus just as arbitrary as January 1st...but at least something other than the calendar changes at First Advent. The Church (capital "C" for the whole of Christendom...sorry, DK) turns her focus to the incarnation and the miracle of God With Us. Advent is a time of preparation and anticipation, sort of like the slow-moving scenes that open movies or the first few chapters of a Tolstoy novel, when you're just learning everyone's several names. It's also a time of introspection and contemplation, preparing one's self for Christ's coming. Sorry...I got lost in the details there. My point, and I do have one, is that the liturgical year is tied to something, a series of immensely important events. I'm more excited by First Advent than January 1st because First Advent actually means something. Of course, it doesn't mean something for everybody. And no, I don't think we ought to alter our calendar to fit the harvests. We're stuck with January 1st, as lousy a date as it might be for beginning a new year. Unless, of course, you're Jewish or Chinese, in which case you're saying "January Shmanuary"...and I'm sure there are other cultures keeping their own calendars. Which, of course, makes January 1st even more meaningless... Anyhow, I'm not a big New Year's guy. And the above rant explains why. |
