Why isn't the new year on the winter solstice? (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Why isn't the new year on the winter solstice? (2018)

slj.ma

74 pointssatchlj46 comments

Not placing new years on the solstice directly gives you the opportunity to get the solstice kick off an interval of festivals/celebration culminating in a new years celebration.

Ancient people (just like us) certainly enjoyed having multi days of festivals/holidays strung together.

The choice of putting the astronomical point at the start or end of the period seems pretty arbitrary (for example, Chinese New Years starts on the new moon, and the lantern festival wraps it all up later on the full moon), but I suspect the "death/rebirth" symbolism of winter solstice strongly biases it towards being more suitable as the start of a celebratory interval, rather than end.

A quick, sloppy scan of new year traditions around the world on wikipedia seems to imply that many customs that start their year on/around the spring equinox have new year kick off the interval.

> The choice of putting the astronomical point at the start or end of the period seems pretty arbitrary

Arbitrary? I find it to be highly logical.

>new year on the winter solstice?

You wouldn't get much of a Christmas vacation then would you?

>Ancient people (just like us)

Exactly.

Iran (and some neighbors) starts the new year on the Spring Equinox, the first day of spring. It’s named Now Ruz which translates to new day. Kinda makes sense to kick off the year at spring. It’s also pretty precise give that it’s an astronomical event. It dates back to at least Zoroastrian times (15th century BCE).

All the equinoxes and solstices are celebrated there. The winter solstice is named Yalda Night, which was a few nights ago and Christmas may be related to this astronomical event. There is also Mehran and Tirgan. Ancients did like to get together and party.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowruz

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yald%C4%81_Night

I like that. I'm in favor of a calendar that works that way. The spring equinox does make a lot of sense. It's when plants start growing again where most people live in the northern hemisphere. The southern hemisphere seasons being the opposite of the north actually makes an equinox more equitable choice for a global calendar start/end point than a solstice.

"dec"ember used to be the 10th month which puts old new years at the beginning of march, a few weeks before the equinox. also, i haven't even noodled this in my head much but I think it works out in which direction it slips the date (hmmm maybe not), but it wasn't till Pope Gregory that it was realized there was a 100 year non leap year problem serious enough to impact the calendar.

The way I heard it, the move from Mar to Jan was not for political reasons, but for tax reasons.

Spring makes sense for starting a new year; rebirth and all that. But it's lousy as the start of a tax year: who's to say whether all the new animals in the herds got born last year, and are already taxable, or this year, and are not?

Start your tax year in the middle of winter, however, (like astronomers used to switch days at noon instead of at midnight) and all is good: no livestock is getting born midwinter so the only fuzziness left is did that sheep die this tax year or last? Much more legible.

> The way I heard it, the move from Mar to Jan was not for political reasons, but for tax reasons.

The start of the year has moved more than once. The ancient Romans moved it from March to January.

For whatever reason, in early modern England, it was back to starting in March-legally speaking, although many of the common people followed the Continental practice of starting it in January. So, when the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 came into force in 1752, it didn’t just introduce the Gregorian calendar and skip 11 days in September, it also moved the start of 1752 from 25 March back to 1 Jan. So 1751 was only 9 and a bit months long - it went 24 Mar 1749, 25 Mar 1750, …, 31 Dec 1750, 1 Jan 1750, …, 24 Mar 1750, 25 Mar 1751, …, 31 Dec 1751, 1 Jan 1752

Scotland had already moved the new year from 25 Mar to 1 January in 1600.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_(New_Style)_Act_175...

Of course the tax year stayed precisely where it was - 25 March in the old calendar.

Hence why the British tax year still starts on April 6th in the “new” Gregorian calendar.

My favorite explanation is that the move was for military reasons. Because Rome had already conquered all nearby lands, they had to mobilize earlier to be ready for the campaign season. That meant elections and many other processes had to be done earlier as well.

>The way I heard it, the move from Mar to Jan was not for political reasons, but for tax reasons.

That sounds unlikely. The tax collector rarely limits their payment demands to just once a year, and many businesses operate on a fiscal year rather than a calendar year.

That's amusing since the UK tax year runs from April to April

Does anybody know the year for this? I put 2018 above because of https://web.archive.org/web/20190513173414/https://gist.gith....

> all of a sudden it was the 4th century CE (i.e. about 1600-1700 years ago)

This, at least, narrows it down a bit.

Somewhere between 1900 and 2098 (or 2099 if the range is inclusive).

People originally regarded spring as the start of a new cycle, and that comes a bit later. Like when the snow melts, frost thaws and new plants start shooting up. The first month was originally March. The names September, October, November and December refer to the seventh, eight, ninth and tenth months.

> they got ¾ of the way through February, got bored, and decided to do something else for a month and come back later.

I'm often the same way. After Presidents Day (US) I want to skip ahead to spring.

Hogmanay (New Year's Eve) falls just after the day with the latest sunrise.

In the days before everyone had clocks and calendars, perhaps this was be easier to determine than the shortest day.

> Then they got lazy and just numbered the months.

* Chinese et al have entered the chat

This pattern is fairly common around the world.

It's amusing to me that in the Western world, the original Latin designations are off by two as we moved the start month but never adjusted the corresponding month numbers (so DECember (10) = 12, etc).

Render unto Caesar the two months that are Caesar's.

And the tm_mon starts from 0

Would be awesome if more would start celebrating the winter solstice again instead of Christmas.

It would unite us more and based on science and not on some arbitrary thoughts.

So in the spirit of it: happy winter solstice everyone! (I know I'm 2 days late)

that was tried in the New Age movement of the 1980s, which got some people going, an American interest in Yoga, some derision but mostly jeers and yawns. You must know that there are holiday ceremonies all around the world at that time, but they are typically considered "old" or "naive" or uneducated. The world-conquering language groups brought with them non-nature based religions, which purposefully offset as people here discuss.

I'm curious if we as humans would be more deceptive to climate change if we would still have nature based beliefs

The world is increasingly united around Christmas, mostly stripped of its religious connotations.

I personally advocate for Thanksgiving to all of my ex-us friends.

That said, I think any effort to coerce the global community into some shared holiday would be much more divisive than unifying.

Celebrate whatever you want and let everyone else enjoy their thing.

It's fun to laugh at this, but they made the system we still use. We still cling on to the stupid and useless concept of months. They fixed their stupid calendar. We cling on to it.

We added daylight savings time, so yeah...

Generous use of we instead of our lords and masters.

> We still cling on to the stupid and useless concept of months.

Dividing the year into 12-or-so roughly equally sized pieces has a lot of advantages for human beings.

The biggest problem is the randomness of the month lengths.

I like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry454 as a replacement (except I’m not sure about the proposed leap week year, I like the ISO 8601 leap week rule better)

You have to wonder what ancient scientists thought about the fact that the lunar month and Earth day don’t evenly divide the solar year. They must have found it extremely vexing.

Nit: There were no ancient "scientists". People who studied what we now call scientific fields of inquiry were called natural philosophers until the late 1800s.

As for the solar year, none of the other planets (which the sun and moon were considered, along with Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) have an obvious correlation with our orbit, so I'd imagine they just considered this the dance of the heavens.

There have always been scientists, at least since the first human formulated a hypothesis about nature and tested that hypothesis with observation or experiment. The term “natural philosopher” is much younger than the science of astronomy, which dates back to pre-agricultural history.

Alternatively, "There have always been natural philosophers, at least since the first human formulated a hypothesis about nature and tested that hypothesis with observation or experiment. The term “scientist” is much younger than the philosophy of astronomy, which dates back to pre-agricultural history."

It's an ill-formed argument either way, but since "science" (c. 1834AD) is a newer term than "φυσιολόγο" (c. 350BC), I'm going to argue my rewrite is the more accurate.

I'd also argue that the study of the stars was more religious than scientific, at least prior to Thales of Miletus (who, as far as we know, was the first epistomologist).

> but since "science" (c. 1834AD) is a newer term than "φυσιολόγο" (c. 350BC)

The word "science" is a lot older than 1834. Have a look at page 225 [0] of the 1622 edition of Richard Hooker's Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, where you will read (my emphasis):

> The reason, why no man can attayne beleefe by the bare contemplation of Heaven and Earth, is, for that they neyther are sufficient to give us as much as the least sparke of Light concerning the very principall Mysteries of our Faith; and whatsoever we may learne by them, the same we can onely attaine to know, according to the manner of naturall Sciences, which meere discourse of Wit and Reason findeth out...

Hooker is here using "natural science" ("naturall Sciences") to mean essentially the same thing as the phrase means today. And, although that's from the 1622 edition, that section of the book was first published in 1597, and I believe that passage is the same in the original 1597 edition (Hooker died in 1600).

Earlier in the same book (also first published 1597), he says (page 193 [1], my emphasis):

> It is with teachers of Mathematicall Sciences usuall, for us in this present question necessary, to lay downe first certaine reasonable demands, which in most particulars following are to serve as Principels whereby to worke, and therefore must be before-hand considered.

Once again, here he is using the phrase "mathematical science" ("Mathematicall Sciences") in essentially the same sense as it is used today. (The point he's making there, is he sees the axiomatic methods used in mathematics as a model for theology to emulate.)

And I doubt those are the first uses of the word "science" in a way clearly compatible with contemporary English usage. They were just the earliest I could find after a brief search.

[0] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=gri.ark:/13960/t0ns23...

[1] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=gri.ark:/13960/t0ns23...

A lot of advantages... Such as?

You can divide year into halves, thirds and quarters. You do not have to negotiate boundaries every time.

It's funny how rarely thirds of a year come up. I can't recall a single thing for which they are used

Some universities divide the academic year into two semesters, others divide it into three trimesters. It also sometimes happens that, within the same university, some programs use one and others use the other-at my alma mater, only a minority of graduate programs used trimesters, every else was semesters.

I think one of the most remarkable things about calendars is the endurance of ‘weeks’. For thousands of years, across civilizations, we’ve been counting off cycles of seven days, presumably successfully keeping in synch with one another, leading to the broad agreement across billions of humans that today is a Sunday.

This is true. Especially considering a "week" isn't tied to any specific astronomical phenomenon, unlike the day, month or year.

Maybe it succeeded because it's not tied to an astronomical phenomenon, and so we aren't tempted to botch it with "leap days" and whatnot.

It is a lunar phase-cycle, roughly. Lunar phases last between 6 and 8 days, with a full 4-phase cycle taking about 29.5 days

The impulse to chop up life into neat and rounded boxes is one of the most annoying and pernicious. Also the jarring rationalistic condescension towards millennia of evolving norms of time keeping. If only this guy was in charge of our lives, how neat and rational everything would be!

What are you on about? Seems like a reasonable question to ask, seemed like a funny way to answer.

Some advice from Mr Costa: Six cups of eggnog Makes my nose rosy red And it get me in the Christmas mood

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