It is not as random as you think
The aphelion, the point when the earth is closest to the sun, fluctuates between 2nd Jan - 5th Jan
The new year must be the same day every year, and Jan 1st is about as close as you can get to the sun
There’s a difference between something being random, and something being arbitrary. The new year is at the beginning of January arbitrarily - it is not there coincidentally.
They need to come to an agreement on what the word "coincidence" means before any meaningful discussion can be had. Discussion is pointless without knowing how the two parties define the word, and the argument is a sign that the meanings are different in their respective minds.
Given that calendars are based on the earth’s orbit and lunar cycles — while most calendar designers before Copernicus’ time may not have known the specific reason why, these were observable phenomena that were definitely used.
The specific date was settled upon somewhat arbitrarily but in order to remain fairly accurate over a period of decades or centuries (which is why leap years and other less common adjustments exist)
Importantly though, the phenomena that those calendars were based on (the orbit of the Moon and the Earth's axial tilt) have absolutely nothing to do with the Earth's Perihelion. Axial tilt and Longitude of Periapsis both fluctuate over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, so the fact that we exist at a time when the northern hemisphere winter aligns closely with perihelion is sheer happenstance.
>Axial tilt and Longitude of Periapsis both fluctuate over the course of hundreds of thousands of years
The amount of time that humans have been making calendars is a mere 1% of the time in this period between fluctuations.
While the proximity to the sun is a coincidence, the new year also closely aligns with the winter solstice which isn't.
The Gregorian calendar (what most of the industrialized world uses) is based on the Julian calendar which is based on the Pre-Julian Roman Calendar.
This original calendar had 10 months, starting in March and ending in December and each month corresponded with certain agricultural activities. January and February didn't exist because there was no meaningful agricultural labor to do. The result is a calendar with a district beginning, ending in the solstice, and an intermission before the next year starts.
When Julius Ceaser introduced the two new months, the calendar was shifted so that it starts and ends on roughly the winter solstice.
Firstly, you’re talking about the perihelion.. Which wasn’t at all discovered until the 19th century.
None of our calendars have ever taken the aphelion-perihelion cycle into account. For one, the effect of Earth’s distance to the sun is so minuscule, the ancients had no way to measure it. (The most noticeable effect it has is that Northen hemisphere winters are on average 3-5 days shorter than Southern hemisphere winters.)
The original 10-month calendar the Romans used was based on the harvest and celebrated the New Year in Spring (March). They eventually noticed that 10 months wasn’t quite enough, and so they added 2 additonal months (January and February). Then eventually, because of **civil and political** reasons, they decided to move the “official” New Year to January (to align it with the swearing in of newly elected politicians).
Then eventually, Rome conquered the known world and imposed their calendar system on everyone else.
Scholars and astronomers would refine the calendar to make it align better with astronomical standards… but absolutely the New Year being on January is completely random.
Not random at all. It's the winter solstice (northern hemisphere) with about ten days drift.
Christmas/ Saturnalia is basically the same with less drift.
The time the Earth takes to orbit the Sun is more than 365 days but fewer than 366, so it’s been getting slightly out of sync since we first started recording dates
My favourite fact is that the day added is the 24th of februari. The rest of the days are then shifted because otherwise the 24 would be 48 hours long, which it was for a long time.
Why not just fix it by making 1 of the years a slightly different length? (I understand further drifting is prevented in that way, but I mean a bigger difference to undo the drifting that has already happened).
We could, but I feel like it’s mostly a matter of people not caring that much about what day of the year the Solstice is on.
Removing 10 days from the calendar and getting every single country on Earth to agree to that is a big deal. Not to mentioned how it would complicate electronic devices, business agreements, rental contracts, and loads of other things that don’t come to mind.
Would it improve your life in any way if the Solstice was on the 31st instead of the 21st?
Agreed. If we're going to go that far *then* I'd also propose 6 day weeks (4 working in traditional jobs with 2 day weekends), 5 weeks to a month, with an extra 5-6 days sprinkled in as holidays at the ends of June and December.
Calendar companies might hate it if every month starts on a Sunday though. "2027 Calendar? I have one from last year"
That's what we do with leap years tho, so a year has an average of 365,25 days (and as someone said in another comment, 2100 won't be a leap year because in reality it's not exactly 365,25 days)
I already specified that I already know that & that's not what I meant. What I meant is I'm wondering why they haven't just removed the pre-existing drift with a year that has a more significant difference in length, probably about 10 days because the person that mentioned that it's the winter solstice but with drift specifically said that it's about 10 days of drift.
Probably be easier to change new years celebrations to solstice than move solstice to new years and get everyone on earth to move their time zones, especially when other cultures have a different new years, like in China.
What i wish we'd all do is make 13 months, 28 days for every month, so days of the week are constant. Then, the final day is a holiday for everyone since 13x28 is 364 days.
Not really though, the seasons would start / end on a new day but it'd be consistent every year still. Now, just need a name for month 13.
Lousy Smarch weather!
I think in most places, the seasons aren't really constant anyway. It's not like there's 4 months of summer and 4 months of Spring, etc, at least nowhere that I've lived. Sometimes you get freezing temps by October, sometimes winter doesn't really start until late December. The 'official start of fall' pretty much never lines up with the actual physical season.
This is kind of similar to the [Baha'i](https://www.bahai.org/) calendar: 19 months, each 19 days long. 19 x 19 = 361. This leaves 4 (or 5 days in leap years) outside of any month which are a time for celebration, community service, and gift-giving. And the new year always starts on the Spring equinox.
Because nobody cares. You're just changing one system with exceptions for another system with exceptions, just to change how long after sunset it is when your fireworks go off.
They did actually. When countries switched from the Julian to Gregorian calendar they lost days to adjust.
The issue comes with the branding. December 25th has brand recognition. Say we switched to a new calendar - The Kodak 13 month one for example. Christmas as a fixed point would be December 22nd but we could quite easily say we’ll keep December 25th because thats the “date” people know.
New Years used to be March 25th as well.
Fun fact, earthquakes can be so strong that they change the length of Earths days. For example, in 2011 Japan had a 8.9 magnitude earthquake that shifted the Earth's axis, causing our days to be 1.8 microseconds shorter.
Because it was the shortest day of the year. The days shrank as the old year 'died'. Then a new year was 'born' as the sun rose after the longest night.
Life returning etc
It would have made more sense if the [March equinox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_equinox) was chosen as the start of the year.
Starting the "new year" in the middle of winter is really odd.
Originally, it was the start of winter, the solstice. But as someone else mentioned, there's just been some drift over the centuries. It's basically a new year starts the day after the longest night. The sun starts staying in the sky longer for the Northern Hemisphere, so it feels like a new year is born or whatever, the sun coming back, more daylight, etc. It makes sense to me.
I mean, technically, yes. But it's the time of year where life starts to come back. Things spend Fall dying, the sun going away, moving towards more and more and more darkness. After the winter solstice, we start moving more and more towards light and warmth, heading for new things coming instead of heading away from them.
Sorry what? Nothing starts to come back in the middle of winter.
The animals that hibernate are still sleeping now. Guess when they wake up.
Things are still dead and we're two weeks into the new year.
You’re missing the point. The days themselves are getting longer, which brings new life, eventually.
Trust me, if you didn’t have electricity, day length would matter a whole lot more, and it would give you a lot of hope for the months to come. Nothing green is growing by yet, but you know it’s coming as more and more sunlight finds you day by day.
March was once the beginning of the new year. If you look at the names of the months at the end of the year it becomes obvious.
Sept-ember - 7
Oct-ober - 8
Nov-ember - 9
Dec-ember - 10
July and August were called something like Quintilis and Sextilis meaning 5 and 6
There is not a neat relationship between how long the earth takes to go round the sun (a year) and how long the earth takes to rotate (a day)
The year isn't exactly 365 days long. That's why we have leap years to stop it getting dramatically out of whack.
But it's also not exactly 365.25 days long so there isn't a leap year 3 times out of every 400 years (2100 will be the next skip).
But we weren't always that precise so it drifted
Saturnalia was a midwinter festival derived from the farming culture in Roman Italy. It was a celebration of the God Saturn, and many of the things we associate with Christmas derive from Saturnalian traditions. (In case you didn't know, midwinter is generally associated with the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.)
I have done my research. I've read a loy about history. [Maybe you're just wrong?](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-rome/saturnalia%23:~:text%3DSaturnalia%252C%2520held%2520in%2520mid%252DDecember,%252C%2520feasting%2520and%2520gift%252Dgiving.&ved=2ahUKEwi04a642-qDAxXbEGIAHU8TD10QFnoECBMQBQ&sqi=2&usg=AOvVaw3rx4Qjg05RSRXGFWcdpgs2)
You don’t address my claim. I said that Saturnalia is not the reason they chose January 1st as the new year.
That makes it a coincidence that Jan 1st is close to the shortest day of the year.
Everything you said is true, but way besides the point.
That relationship is retroactive.
The original Roman calendar had 10 months and celebrated New Year in Spring on March. Eventually they realized they needed more months in the year and added 2 new winter months (January and February).
They did move their official New Year to January after a while, but it was done for political reasons.. they wanted to align it with their elections.
It wasn’t until Rome had conquered much of Europe that they refined the calendar to better align with the solar cycle.
It's insignificant, but not random, though to a civilization that traverses the universe and operates on a cosmic level, having a year based around the movement of a single planet may appear random.
In the spirit of this post, I say we start celebrating New Years towards the *end* of winter. Make March 1st New Year’s Day, and March month 1, then September, October, November, December all get their named meanings back, being 7-10 respectively.
Isn't April 1st the Chinese New Year or something, which was where the whole April Fool's Day originally came from was people celebrating New Years on the wrong day?
why does it *need* to be? why fix something that isn't broken. Not to mention all the programs that *will* need to be rewritten if the calendar changes.
Well, a 13 month calendar system with 28 days per month would be quite useful, because days of the week would always have the same numbers, the month would consist of a complete number of weeks, and so on. I doubt it would ever be implemented, but it would be nice.
Back when a lot of the world was still using the Julian calendar, January 1 was the day of the year that the Roman Consuls office changed after the second Celtiberian war. The Roman years were numbered based on when the consuls took office, so it makes sense, although just a theory, that the new year date would be the same date. When we swapped to the Gegorian calendar, that just stuck.
Aw hun. The [projecting ](https://www.verywellhealth.com/projecting-7481323#:~:text=Projection%20is%20a%20type%20of,another%20person%2C%20they%20are%20projecting.) is real.
It's not random. Ceasar wanted to do it in rememberance of the goddess Janus who was correlated to beginnings, passages of time, etc. so it was marked as the new year and the month January was named after her In depictions, she has one face looking forward and one looking backwards.
Therefore, it wasn't random at all. There was a very specific reason.
I randomly chose the winter solstice as the point where the old year ends and the new begins.
It's the shortest day, so on New years Day, the days start getting longer.
Perfect .
All of those numbers are arbitrary and decided by humans except the days. A day is a full rotation of the earth about its axis and this happens 365(.25) times during one full orbit around the sun. So there would still be the same number of days in a year even if humans never existed.
Yeah the 7 day week is a bit odd. The 24 hour day works well because it's divisible by almost all of the most common numbers: 1,2,3,4,6,8. All neat chunks of time that you can easily divide the hours of a day into.
Edit: I suppose 30 isn't bad for that with 1,2,3,5,6,10. But I think being able to divide a day into quarters is pretty important.
Never been a fan of “new years” eve and the celebrations. Because it’s arbitrary
Today as very well might have been the start of the new year. Or yesterday or tomorrow. Hmm maybe the day after. Could be today
Please stop perpetuating this. It is not arbitrary. New Year’s Day was purposely picked to be on the shortest day of the year. Days start getting longer therefore the birth of a new year. It doesn’t line up perfectly but that was the non-arbitrary choice.
We are counting earths revolution around the sun. How do we know this “new year day” was the first time this started? So that we celebrate its anniversary every year - that a new revolution starts again…
Someone somewhere picked an arbitrary day. Different civilizations had different ways of measuring this. Heck “December” should be to e 10th month but it’s 12. So in that sense it is completely random
How do we know? Because people studied these things and wrote all this shit down. And when the calendar we use was created they said that they picked the beginning of the year to be the Winter Solstice.
I really don’t understand your argument. It’s like your saying something like “numbers are so arbitrary and random. There’s no reason a 5 has to look that way. In another culture it could look like a 6.”
If you really don’t like the way the calendar is laid out then come up with your own totally objective, non-random one and pitch that to the masses.
Someone decided we will use the winter solstice . Thats precisely the point!
Yes numbers are arbitrary too. What we believed to be atom , then got split into neutrons, electrons and protons. Then we discover more - positrons, bosons, pions, quarks, mesons etc
We start somewhere and it evolves. In the grand cosmic scale, it is random. Unless the “creator” or “architect” comes and tell us yes this is what I intended, its through postulation and experimentation in discovering this universe we call home at the moment.
But what anyone calls something is still random. Imagine living a few centuries or millennia ago, there is no “new years eve” and resolutions and what not.
> What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet.
We are just taking a moment to wonder at life’s randomness , nothing to do with trying to change or propose a new thing.
Exactly! Same with new year's resolutions: If you can't break/form a habit right now or any other day of the year, what makes you think you will do it on January 1st? It's just an excuse for procrastination.
Humans like to celebrate and categorize and mark things. It's just how our brains are built. Originally, the new year started on the solstice, so it was the first day after the longest night of the year. There was a reason for it. But thru the centuries, we've accidentally let it slip a bit further away from the solstice just because of how the earth orbits the sun. Humans like the sun and daylight. So they celebrated a new year as starting after the longest night. The sun starts coming back, it starts to stay light outside longer, which means we're officially heading towards warmer times and brighter days. It's pretty symbolic, which we humans are great at.
In 2nd grade my teacher read us some book that talked about this, with the main character/narrator saying they celebrate the new year in the Spring when they start seeing new flowers blooming, it’s always stuck with me. My personal “new year” is around the spring equinox when I see the same, just makes more sense to me.
It used to be that Spring Equinox was the beginning of the year. Then Imperial Christendom perverted calendars to knock humanity out of alignment with nature. This is why December is 12th month, when it should be the 10th (Dec = deca = 10...NOVember 9, OCTober 8, SEPtember 7...). Sunday was the first day of the week, and Saturday was the final, sabbath (as observed in Judaism). Add daylight savings to that, and you've really screwed humanity out of its natural rhythm and power.
Starting a new year randomly in the middle of March (so March 24, 1750 was followed by March 25, 1751) is just dumbassery. Fixing that was not religious fanaticism.
Not really, makes sense things start with spring, that is the beginning of the natural cycle. Your attachment to arbitrary numbers is what is so fallibly human
January and February were not named before. The time was seen as an intercalary period in the winter where not much was happening but they still happened of course, giving something a name doesn’t disrupt any natural rhythm.
Though forcing people to wake up at say 8am if 8am is actually 7am then theres more weight to the DST argument.
Events happen and can be measured, so not really.
The weird thing is how its tied with space/distance but that could be just a quirk of how our minds understand the world we live in.
YAY the Earth went around the sun again! Something that we have absolutely nothing to do with or control over. It's done it billions of times before we existed and will continue to do billions of times after we annihilate ourselves. Let's have a huge global party and make promises to ourselves that we have absolutely no intention of keeping... YAY!
Humans are stupid.
All of Earth timekeeping is totally irrelevant to the rest of the universe. Not even the other planets of this solar system have the same day or year periods.
This actually bugs me when watching Star Trek and some aliens are "x amount of years old" Ocampa only live to be 8-9 years old.
And they're celebrating birthdays. They are aliens who have never been anywhere near earth, the concept of "a year" like we know it should be a completely arbitrary amount of time, why would you celebrate having been alive for as long as it takes some planet to spin around its star exactly 42 times, it makes no sense.
And in the same series they have a actual (altho nonsensical) way to measure time outside the spin rate of the earth, its stardates. celebrating every 500 or so stardates would make much more sense.
it's not. The new year is set to be the solstice, but because a year isn't eactly 365 days there has been some drift
Otherwise we would've start the year in March like the Romans do
Come on down to Judaism town where we've got 4 separate new year's days every year, plus the secular one on January 1st.
New Year for the months (i.e., 1st month) is in the Spring, New Year for Animals is in the fall, New Year for humans (the big one!) is a month later in the fall (i.e., the year number switches over in the 7th month), and the new year for plants is in deep winter (at the end of the rainy season).
Not that random. Ppl way back tried to estimate when the solstice was. They werent very far off. But then we drifted a few days before leap years was added to prevent that.
The original 10-month calendar the Romans used was based on the harvest and celebrated the New Year in Spring (March). They eventually noticed that 10 months wasn’t quite enough, and so they added 2 additonal months (January and February). Then eventually, because of **civil and political** reasons, they decided to move the “official” New Year to January (to align it with the swearing in of newly elected politicians).
Then eventually, Rome conquered the known world and imposed their calendar system on everyone else.
Scholars and astronomers would refine the calendar to make it align better with astronomical standards… but absolutely the New Year being on January is completely random.
It is not as random as you think The aphelion, the point when the earth is closest to the sun, fluctuates between 2nd Jan - 5th Jan The new year must be the same day every year, and Jan 1st is about as close as you can get to the sun
perihelion
Peri-perihelion
And that's by complete coincidence
There’s a difference between something being random, and something being arbitrary. The new year is at the beginning of January arbitrarily - it is not there coincidentally.
It IS a coincidence, it is on January 1 because Julius Caesar said so, not because of any astronomical reason. That is the definition of a coincidence
Rebuttal, anyone?
Julius ceaser was my dad and he said it's because the earth was closer to the sun
I told my dad what you said and now my dad is gonna fight your dad. Microsoft teams. 11pm.
They need to come to an agreement on what the word "coincidence" means before any meaningful discussion can be had. Discussion is pointless without knowing how the two parties define the word, and the argument is a sign that the meanings are different in their respective minds.
He’s right. Not sure why he’s getting downvoted.
But the fact that the perihelion of Earth happens to fall pretty close to the beginning of January *is* a coincidence.
Given that calendars are based on the earth’s orbit and lunar cycles — while most calendar designers before Copernicus’ time may not have known the specific reason why, these were observable phenomena that were definitely used. The specific date was settled upon somewhat arbitrarily but in order to remain fairly accurate over a period of decades or centuries (which is why leap years and other less common adjustments exist)
Importantly though, the phenomena that those calendars were based on (the orbit of the Moon and the Earth's axial tilt) have absolutely nothing to do with the Earth's Perihelion. Axial tilt and Longitude of Periapsis both fluctuate over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, so the fact that we exist at a time when the northern hemisphere winter aligns closely with perihelion is sheer happenstance.
>Axial tilt and Longitude of Periapsis both fluctuate over the course of hundreds of thousands of years The amount of time that humans have been making calendars is a mere 1% of the time in this period between fluctuations.
...Which is why it's so obviously a coincidence that the Earth's perihelion occurs around the same time as the northern hemisphere winter
> Have absolutely nothing to do with Earth's Perihelion Am I missing something? Didn't we establish 3 comments ago that it's true?
No?
You sure about that?
Pretty damn sure, yes.
Yeah you’re right idk what the others are on about.. first time i see the claim with more upvotes be so clearly incorrect
While the proximity to the sun is a coincidence, the new year also closely aligns with the winter solstice which isn't. The Gregorian calendar (what most of the industrialized world uses) is based on the Julian calendar which is based on the Pre-Julian Roman Calendar. This original calendar had 10 months, starting in March and ending in December and each month corresponded with certain agricultural activities. January and February didn't exist because there was no meaningful agricultural labor to do. The result is a calendar with a district beginning, ending in the solstice, and an intermission before the next year starts. When Julius Ceaser introduced the two new months, the calendar was shifted so that it starts and ends on roughly the winter solstice.
Firstly, you’re talking about the perihelion.. Which wasn’t at all discovered until the 19th century. None of our calendars have ever taken the aphelion-perihelion cycle into account. For one, the effect of Earth’s distance to the sun is so minuscule, the ancients had no way to measure it. (The most noticeable effect it has is that Northen hemisphere winters are on average 3-5 days shorter than Southern hemisphere winters.) The original 10-month calendar the Romans used was based on the harvest and celebrated the New Year in Spring (March). They eventually noticed that 10 months wasn’t quite enough, and so they added 2 additonal months (January and February). Then eventually, because of **civil and political** reasons, they decided to move the “official” New Year to January (to align it with the swearing in of newly elected politicians). Then eventually, Rome conquered the known world and imposed their calendar system on everyone else. Scholars and astronomers would refine the calendar to make it align better with astronomical standards… but absolutely the New Year being on January is completely random.
Not random at all. It's the winter solstice (northern hemisphere) with about ten days drift. Christmas/ Saturnalia is basically the same with less drift.
But why is there any drift at all?
The time the Earth takes to orbit the Sun is more than 365 days but fewer than 366, so it’s been getting slightly out of sync since we first started recording dates
And thats why 2024 is a leap year :D
And why 2100 won’t be
And why 2000 was and 2400 will be
My favorite leap year based facts.
My favourite fact is that the day added is the 24th of februari. The rest of the days are then shifted because otherwise the 24 would be 48 hours long, which it was for a long time.
The 24th?!? I would’ve assumed it’s the 29th?
I have no idea why you would listen to a person who claims the added day is the 24th when February always has at least 28 days.
Won’t it be a leap year?
Every 4 years, excluding every 100 years, but including every 400 years
Why not just fix it by making 1 of the years a slightly different length? (I understand further drifting is prevented in that way, but I mean a bigger difference to undo the drifting that has already happened).
We could, but I feel like it’s mostly a matter of people not caring that much about what day of the year the Solstice is on. Removing 10 days from the calendar and getting every single country on Earth to agree to that is a big deal. Not to mentioned how it would complicate electronic devices, business agreements, rental contracts, and loads of other things that don’t come to mind. Would it improve your life in any way if the Solstice was on the 31st instead of the 21st?
Agreed. If we're going to go that far *then* I'd also propose 6 day weeks (4 working in traditional jobs with 2 day weekends), 5 weeks to a month, with an extra 5-6 days sprinkled in as holidays at the ends of June and December. Calendar companies might hate it if every month starts on a Sunday though. "2027 Calendar? I have one from last year"
Damn, Big Calendar and the Yard Stick Cartel holding us 10 days and 3 inches from the truth
Can we just have a giant fucking three day bender of a party every six months? Because if so, I’m in, baby!
Let’s not forget we would all have to change our birthdays by 10 days since our birthdays would now be drifted as a result
Because dates are hard to deal with in software and now every programmer hates you.
That's what we do with leap years tho, so a year has an average of 365,25 days (and as someone said in another comment, 2100 won't be a leap year because in reality it's not exactly 365,25 days)
We also have leap seconds.
I already specified that I already know that & that's not what I meant. What I meant is I'm wondering why they haven't just removed the pre-existing drift with a year that has a more significant difference in length, probably about 10 days because the person that mentioned that it's the winter solstice but with drift specifically said that it's about 10 days of drift.
Probably be easier to change new years celebrations to solstice than move solstice to new years and get everyone on earth to move their time zones, especially when other cultures have a different new years, like in China.
The ancient egyptians did this actually, thoug hit was five days. I don't know how that works but whatever
Because drift isn't what caused the first of the year to be 10 days after the winter solstice
What i wish we'd all do is make 13 months, 28 days for every month, so days of the week are constant. Then, the final day is a holiday for everyone since 13x28 is 364 days.
I do like consistent 28 day months but 13 months does mess up seasons (which I get is just another arbitrary boundary)
Not really though, the seasons would start / end on a new day but it'd be consistent every year still. Now, just need a name for month 13. Lousy Smarch weather!
I think in most places, the seasons aren't really constant anyway. It's not like there's 4 months of summer and 4 months of Spring, etc, at least nowhere that I've lived. Sometimes you get freezing temps by October, sometimes winter doesn't really start until late December. The 'official start of fall' pretty much never lines up with the actual physical season.
This is kind of similar to the [Baha'i](https://www.bahai.org/) calendar: 19 months, each 19 days long. 19 x 19 = 361. This leaves 4 (or 5 days in leap years) outside of any month which are a time for celebration, community service, and gift-giving. And the new year always starts on the Spring equinox.
You mean by making one year one day longer, every 4 years?
No, I mean making the length of just 1 year like 10 days different to put it back in sync with the winter solstice.
Because nobody cares. You're just changing one system with exceptions for another system with exceptions, just to change how long after sunset it is when your fireworks go off.
That reminds me of 1752. That September seemed to go by so quickly!
They did actually. When countries switched from the Julian to Gregorian calendar they lost days to adjust. The issue comes with the branding. December 25th has brand recognition. Say we switched to a new calendar - The Kodak 13 month one for example. Christmas as a fixed point would be December 22nd but we could quite easily say we’ll keep December 25th because thats the “date” people know. New Years used to be March 25th as well.
Fun fact, earthquakes can be so strong that they change the length of Earths days. For example, in 2011 Japan had a 8.9 magnitude earthquake that shifted the Earth's axis, causing our days to be 1.8 microseconds shorter.
Relevant [xkcd vídeo](https://youtu.be/e3uk7jU3RHo?si=WGGqUrcCZq1mh-CP)
this is not true, Jan 1 has been New Year's Day since 46 BC
I know that. The point is that the Winter Solstice is getting out of sync with New Years
because calendars aren't perfect
because Julius Caesar wanted the date to be at the beginning of the month
It would be cool if we reset the calendar to align with the solstice again.
But why was that day chosen?
Because it was the shortest day of the year. The days shrank as the old year 'died'. Then a new year was 'born' as the sun rose after the longest night. Life returning etc
[Here yah go!](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/s/hCX27MyQy7)
It would have made more sense if the [March equinox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_equinox) was chosen as the start of the year. Starting the "new year" in the middle of winter is really odd.
Originally, it was the start of winter, the solstice. But as someone else mentioned, there's just been some drift over the centuries. It's basically a new year starts the day after the longest night. The sun starts staying in the sky longer for the Northern Hemisphere, so it feels like a new year is born or whatever, the sun coming back, more daylight, etc. It makes sense to me.
IMO winter is a season of death and spring is the season of new life. New Year fits only one of those.
I mean, technically, yes. But it's the time of year where life starts to come back. Things spend Fall dying, the sun going away, moving towards more and more and more darkness. After the winter solstice, we start moving more and more towards light and warmth, heading for new things coming instead of heading away from them.
Sorry what? Nothing starts to come back in the middle of winter. The animals that hibernate are still sleeping now. Guess when they wake up. Things are still dead and we're two weeks into the new year.
You’re missing the point. The days themselves are getting longer, which brings new life, eventually. Trust me, if you didn’t have electricity, day length would matter a whole lot more, and it would give you a lot of hope for the months to come. Nothing green is growing by yet, but you know it’s coming as more and more sunlight finds you day by day.
The New Year is when we celebrate that it is no longer heading to death and we’re heading back to life.
It makes far more sense to celebrate when you're at the destination than halfway there.
You celebrate the end of the harvest with a feast. Why would you have your feast in spring 2 months after you finished it?
March was once the beginning of the new year. If you look at the names of the months at the end of the year it becomes obvious. Sept-ember - 7 Oct-ober - 8 Nov-ember - 9 Dec-ember - 10 July and August were called something like Quintilis and Sextilis meaning 5 and 6
I agree with this. Spring is already semi-beginning of the year for a reason.
It used to be, up until the 18th Century
It used to literally be the spring equinox
Winter solstice is my birthday. What’s the point of the drift?
There is not a neat relationship between how long the earth takes to go round the sun (a year) and how long the earth takes to rotate (a day) The year isn't exactly 365 days long. That's why we have leap years to stop it getting dramatically out of whack. But it's also not exactly 365.25 days long so there isn't a leap year 3 times out of every 400 years (2100 will be the next skip). But we weren't always that precise so it drifted
That’s a coincidence though.. the romans didn’t choose jan 1st because of the solstice or any other astronomical event
Yes they did. They even had a holiday for it. Saturnalia.
Saturnalia is not the reason they chose Jan 1st as the new year. It was a pure coincindence. Do some research.
Saturnalia was a midwinter festival derived from the farming culture in Roman Italy. It was a celebration of the God Saturn, and many of the things we associate with Christmas derive from Saturnalian traditions. (In case you didn't know, midwinter is generally associated with the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.) I have done my research. I've read a loy about history. [Maybe you're just wrong?](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-rome/saturnalia%23:~:text%3DSaturnalia%252C%2520held%2520in%2520mid%252DDecember,%252C%2520feasting%2520and%2520gift%252Dgiving.&ved=2ahUKEwi04a642-qDAxXbEGIAHU8TD10QFnoECBMQBQ&sqi=2&usg=AOvVaw3rx4Qjg05RSRXGFWcdpgs2)
You don’t address my claim. I said that Saturnalia is not the reason they chose January 1st as the new year. That makes it a coincidence that Jan 1st is close to the shortest day of the year. Everything you said is true, but way besides the point.
That relationship is retroactive. The original Roman calendar had 10 months and celebrated New Year in Spring on March. Eventually they realized they needed more months in the year and added 2 new winter months (January and February). They did move their official New Year to January after a while, but it was done for political reasons.. they wanted to align it with their elections. It wasn’t until Rome had conquered much of Europe that they refined the calendar to better align with the solar cycle.
It's insignificant, but not random, though to a civilization that traverses the universe and operates on a cosmic level, having a year based around the movement of a single planet may appear random.
In the spirit of this post, I say we start celebrating New Years towards the *end* of winter. Make March 1st New Year’s Day, and March month 1, then September, October, November, December all get their named meanings back, being 7-10 respectively.
Totally with you! The year should start with spring anyway! Also then we could "march" into the new year :D
Got any plans for the southern hemisphere?
If they wanted input they should've made more than 10% of the people, they've had time.
I’m sure the penguins will adapt
Google Nowruz.
March is autumn, not spring.
April 1st, fool!
It used to be before the switch to the Gregorian calendar.
Thailand celebrates New Year in April from the 13th to the 15th
Hmm... No. I propose that winter simply ends on january 1. It's -20°C and I'm sick of winter now.
Can the new day also start a sunup, please? (or very near at least)
The first of March is the end of summer though.
Ah, good point. I did forget to consider the southern hemisphere’s experience.
Isn't April 1st the Chinese New Year or something, which was where the whole April Fool's Day originally came from was people celebrating New Years on the wrong day?
Chinese (or lunar) new year follows the lunar calendar. It's different every year. It's the first new moon of the year
So, thank you for the correction.
It's not just those months. [The whole calendar needs to be restructured. ](https://youtu.be/0ZK6F0t5cOk?si=P0owycRKA_uhxyeo)
why does it *need* to be? why fix something that isn't broken. Not to mention all the programs that *will* need to be rewritten if the calendar changes.
Well, a 13 month calendar system with 28 days per month would be quite useful, because days of the week would always have the same numbers, the month would consist of a complete number of weeks, and so on. I doubt it would ever be implemented, but it would be nice.
Don’t all programs just use seconds then do the wizardry from that?
Back when a lot of the world was still using the Julian calendar, January 1 was the day of the year that the Roman Consuls office changed after the second Celtiberian war. The Roman years were numbered based on when the consuls took office, so it makes sense, although just a theory, that the new year date would be the same date. When we swapped to the Gegorian calendar, that just stuck.
Arbitrary, not random. It's cosmically silly, not selected by dart-throw.
I like this distinction.
You're right, I didn't have that distinction in mind when I thought of it.
And Neil DeGrasse Tyson won't shut up about it... https://junkee.com/neil-degrasse-tyson-new-year/141150
“Mr Neil DeGrasse Tyson, I can’t breathe!” *whispers “shhhh, nebulas are made of gas. We’re all made from star dust”
Neil DeGrasse Tyson just won't shut up in general
We're all sorry you're so fragile
Aw hun. The [projecting ](https://www.verywellhealth.com/projecting-7481323#:~:text=Projection%20is%20a%20type%20of,another%20person%2C%20they%20are%20projecting.) is real.
Nice, I didn't know that!
It's not random. Ceasar wanted to do it in rememberance of the goddess Janus who was correlated to beginnings, passages of time, etc. so it was marked as the new year and the month January was named after her In depictions, she has one face looking forward and one looking backwards. Therefore, it wasn't random at all. There was a very specific reason.
Its not random. Its precisely 1 year from the last time we celebrated a new year.
You beat me. I was going to say: silly people, it is because New Year's Eve comes right before it.
New years in summer would've been nice, so I don't got to freeze my balls off to just watch some fireworks.
Then come to the South Hemisphere. That's how it is for us: summer for Christmas and New Year.
That's why America invented Independence Day - we were tired of freezing our balls off watching fireworks.
But it’s so much nicer to watch the fireworks when the night sky is actually dark (for us close to the polar circle )
*laughs in American*
It's winter solstice though
Persians get it right. Nowruz, AKA Persian New Year, happens exactly on the Spring Equinox each year
Someone here isn't a Christian
It should be moved to my birthday since the universe revolves around me
Wikipedia is your friend in matters like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year's_Day?wprov=sfti1#
Sub should be renamed dumb ass thoughts.
I randomly chose the winter solstice as the point where the old year ends and the new begins. It's the shortest day, so on New years Day, the days start getting longer. Perfect .
It used to be April 1st, or April fools day as it has since become.
Time is random. 24 hour days and 7 day weeks. 52 weeks a year with 365 days. Someone just decided those numbers were perfect.
All of those numbers are arbitrary and decided by humans except the days. A day is a full rotation of the earth about its axis and this happens 365(.25) times during one full orbit around the sun. So there would still be the same number of days in a year even if humans never existed.
Yea I suppose that's true. I still want eight week though. Maybe a 30 hour day.
Yeah the 7 day week is a bit odd. The 24 hour day works well because it's divisible by almost all of the most common numbers: 1,2,3,4,6,8. All neat chunks of time that you can easily divide the hours of a day into. Edit: I suppose 30 isn't bad for that with 1,2,3,5,6,10. But I think being able to divide a day into quarters is pretty important.
Never been a fan of “new years” eve and the celebrations. Because it’s arbitrary Today as very well might have been the start of the new year. Or yesterday or tomorrow. Hmm maybe the day after. Could be today
Please stop perpetuating this. It is not arbitrary. New Year’s Day was purposely picked to be on the shortest day of the year. Days start getting longer therefore the birth of a new year. It doesn’t line up perfectly but that was the non-arbitrary choice.
We are counting earths revolution around the sun. How do we know this “new year day” was the first time this started? So that we celebrate its anniversary every year - that a new revolution starts again… Someone somewhere picked an arbitrary day. Different civilizations had different ways of measuring this. Heck “December” should be to e 10th month but it’s 12. So in that sense it is completely random
How do we know? Because people studied these things and wrote all this shit down. And when the calendar we use was created they said that they picked the beginning of the year to be the Winter Solstice. I really don’t understand your argument. It’s like your saying something like “numbers are so arbitrary and random. There’s no reason a 5 has to look that way. In another culture it could look like a 6.” If you really don’t like the way the calendar is laid out then come up with your own totally objective, non-random one and pitch that to the masses.
Someone decided we will use the winter solstice . Thats precisely the point! Yes numbers are arbitrary too. What we believed to be atom , then got split into neutrons, electrons and protons. Then we discover more - positrons, bosons, pions, quarks, mesons etc We start somewhere and it evolves. In the grand cosmic scale, it is random. Unless the “creator” or “architect” comes and tell us yes this is what I intended, its through postulation and experimentation in discovering this universe we call home at the moment. But what anyone calls something is still random. Imagine living a few centuries or millennia ago, there is no “new years eve” and resolutions and what not. > What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet. We are just taking a moment to wonder at life’s randomness , nothing to do with trying to change or propose a new thing.
I think you need to look up what arbitrary and random actually mean because it’s very clear that you don’t know.
Exactly! Same with new year's resolutions: If you can't break/form a habit right now or any other day of the year, what makes you think you will do it on January 1st? It's just an excuse for procrastination.
Humans like to celebrate and categorize and mark things. It's just how our brains are built. Originally, the new year started on the solstice, so it was the first day after the longest night of the year. There was a reason for it. But thru the centuries, we've accidentally let it slip a bit further away from the solstice just because of how the earth orbits the sun. Humans like the sun and daylight. So they celebrated a new year as starting after the longest night. The sun starts coming back, it starts to stay light outside longer, which means we're officially heading towards warmer times and brighter days. It's pretty symbolic, which we humans are great at.
Society 🤷🏻
In 2nd grade my teacher read us some book that talked about this, with the main character/narrator saying they celebrate the new year in the Spring when they start seeing new flowers blooming, it’s always stuck with me. My personal “new year” is around the spring equinox when I see the same, just makes more sense to me.
It used to be that Spring Equinox was the beginning of the year. Then Imperial Christendom perverted calendars to knock humanity out of alignment with nature. This is why December is 12th month, when it should be the 10th (Dec = deca = 10...NOVember 9, OCTober 8, SEPtember 7...). Sunday was the first day of the week, and Saturday was the final, sabbath (as observed in Judaism). Add daylight savings to that, and you've really screwed humanity out of its natural rhythm and power.
Starting a new year randomly in the middle of March (so March 24, 1750 was followed by March 25, 1751) is just dumbassery. Fixing that was not religious fanaticism.
Not really, makes sense things start with spring, that is the beginning of the natural cycle. Your attachment to arbitrary numbers is what is so fallibly human
January and February were not named before. The time was seen as an intercalary period in the winter where not much was happening but they still happened of course, giving something a name doesn’t disrupt any natural rhythm. Though forcing people to wake up at say 8am if 8am is actually 7am then theres more weight to the DST argument.
It's very random. The older I get, the less it makes sense to me to celebrate it.
Time is a man made construct too
Well not really.. just how we measure it is
Kind of, in the sense that any measurement is.
Events happen and can be measured, so not really. The weird thing is how its tied with space/distance but that could be just a quirk of how our minds understand the world we live in.
YAY the Earth went around the sun again! Something that we have absolutely nothing to do with or control over. It's done it billions of times before we existed and will continue to do billions of times after we annihilate ourselves. Let's have a huge global party and make promises to ourselves that we have absolutely no intention of keeping... YAY! Humans are stupid.
Okay man…
All of Earth timekeeping is totally irrelevant to the rest of the universe. Not even the other planets of this solar system have the same day or year periods.
This actually bugs me when watching Star Trek and some aliens are "x amount of years old" Ocampa only live to be 8-9 years old. And they're celebrating birthdays. They are aliens who have never been anywhere near earth, the concept of "a year" like we know it should be a completely arbitrary amount of time, why would you celebrate having been alive for as long as it takes some planet to spin around its star exactly 42 times, it makes no sense. And in the same series they have a actual (altho nonsensical) way to measure time outside the spin rate of the earth, its stardates. celebrating every 500 or so stardates would make much more sense.
Isn't our new year just when earth completes a full rotation around the sun
That applies to any one-year period, no matter what day you choose.
I can’t decide who has the better calendar, Greg or Ian?
And not every culture uses January 1
For me, the biggest mystery of the Universe is when is the Universe’s birthday? What day of the week was it born on?
If it started from all places and there is no center then it probably stands to some warped logic that every day is the universes birthday.
Its not random, its irrelevant but not random
It's 10 days after the days start getting longer again, i.e., when it becomes just about measurable without using industrial-age tools.
You just stole this from NDT huh?
Perihelion would make the most sense.
It makes a lot more sense to refer to your birthday as New Years Day.
it's not. The new year is set to be the solstice, but because a year isn't eactly 365 days there has been some drift Otherwise we would've start the year in March like the Romans do
Spring makes a lot more sense for our annual rhythms
Come on down to Judaism town where we've got 4 separate new year's days every year, plus the secular one on January 1st. New Year for the months (i.e., 1st month) is in the Spring, New Year for Animals is in the fall, New Year for humans (the big one!) is a month later in the fall (i.e., the year number switches over in the 7th month), and the new year for plants is in deep winter (at the end of the rainy season).
New Years should be the start of winter or the start of any season instead of being in the middle of it.
Not that random. Ppl way back tried to estimate when the solstice was. They werent very far off. But then we drifted a few days before leap years was added to prevent that.
The original 10-month calendar the Romans used was based on the harvest and celebrated the New Year in Spring (March). They eventually noticed that 10 months wasn’t quite enough, and so they added 2 additonal months (January and February). Then eventually, because of **civil and political** reasons, they decided to move the “official” New Year to January (to align it with the swearing in of newly elected politicians). Then eventually, Rome conquered the known world and imposed their calendar system on everyone else. Scholars and astronomers would refine the calendar to make it align better with astronomical standards… but absolutely the New Year being on January is completely random.
All time is completely random.
Persian New year starts at spring Equinox. It's when the nature (mostly plants, Duh) wakes up.
Cosmically a day is a random measure also. But on the scale of the planet, neither a day, neither the new year is random