I would now like a 1,000-word essay on the point in time at which various cultures throughout history started over for their new year, and why. Go!
...and something much more valuable revealed itself.
I looked at the New Year in meme-inspiring cultures, like ninjas and samurai, pirates, and the Maya. I looked at fictional New Year celebrations, like the Jedi, the Star Trek universe, and the satirical Diskworld. I looked at celebrations from the International Date Line back around to itself. (Wouldn't it be interesting to walk around the North Pole to experience the turn of the New Year every hour?)And then my friend reached a moment of need. She exclaimed, potentially in despair, to the support structure she built for herself on Facebook,
"This year fucking sucks. I am done with it."The affirmations she was asking for started pouring out from her friends, but a couple other things peeked through. One was the idea that she could, to avoid the rest of the year, swoop into the future to the end of the year, comment on the post, and thereby prove the meme of Mayan-predicted apocolypse invalid. Another was that she could choose to hereby end the year and start counting a new one, just like all the myriad calendars with "starts" throughout the year.
Years, historically and culturally, are not arbitrary, as one might imagine, and some have never needed improvement. Take the Assyrian calendar: it starts on the first of April and has for the past 6,763 years. Thus these not-arbitrary calendars are based on something. Great. What?
Several are based on the beginning of spring, the vernal equinox. These include the Baha'i, the Persian, and the Kurdish. Some are based on a traditional combination of a full moon and an equinox/solstice, such as the Bengali and the Napali, starting mid-April, or the Runic, starting the first full moon after the winter solstice, landing on or near January 1st, which, of course, is the Gregorian calendar's first day of the year (the one we use). There are the calendars that has a specific start date for some other reason: North Korea starts counting from Kim Jong Il's birthday. Other calendars are more flexible in comparison to the Gregorian calendar: the Chinese calendar started the end of January and will end in February of 2013; the Hebrew calendar will begin September 12 of 2012 and end about a week later in 2013; the Julian calendar, used in Egypt and elsewhere, starts August 29th or 30th; and the Celts begin their year November 1st or so.
Nearly every calendar accounts for the extra fraction of the day it takes to orbit the sun. There are mini-months of 5 days, there are 1 or 2 whole months added seemingly at random, there are single days tacked on every few years. Most calendars are kept stable and consistent. (Wouldn't it be fun NOT to account for the irreconcilable difference between earth's orbit and rotation? I could celebrate my birthday in the snow. In fact, it could be quite convenient because as it is I can't ever celebrate my son's birthday at a park because of snow.)
So back to my assignment, and the fact that I've abandoned it in lieu of the more pressing discussion of my friend. Perhaps it would help you to know she has lupus and pulmonary hypertension, is allergic to all the standard versions of medical devices she could have implanted to help her, can barely fight an infection, needs a heart transplant, and just wanted to have a beer on St. Patty's Day, but couldn't due to her date's health for once, instead of her own. Perhaps it would help you to understand how much power her two sentences can have over another person's life. Perhaps you will now know why I have given her a joyous happy new year greeting, on March 27th of 2012, no day of importance to anyone but her, and that she is indeed taking the advice of starting her year anew.
Did I say calendars weren't arbitrary? Well, now they are. Should you decide you need to trash this manuscript, or at least file it away for posterity, and start a new one, you may. You have hereby been granted permission. Maybe one day we can ask each other, "When does your year start?" instead of "How old are you?" for this marks the day they've made their own. There is one more culture I looked at and it intrigued me especially. The Akan calendar doesn't use years. They just have a 42 day month, and then they start a new one. Just like that. New leaf: turned. Who said "year" meant "orbit?"
Sources:Links from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_calendars
