Frazz by Jef Mallett for January 03, 2022

Yeah. I’ve always thought that new years day and solstice ought to co-occur.

A year (why call it new year? it’s just the beginning of a year) starts at an arbitrary time so logic doesn’t play into it.

Someone. Someone not you.

Humankind likes things fixed in a permanent orderly fashion. [Safety in repetition.]

Nature doesn’t care. Man tracht und Gott lacht.

A man said to the universe:

“Sir, I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

War Is Kind, Stanza 96 – Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

Stuff happens.

In the end there can be only 42!

It would make more sense to start a season in-between a solstice and an equinox.

Today would be a pretty good day to begin the year. It is approximately on this day of the year when the earth is at its perihelion (the closest point in its slightly elliptical orbit around the sun). The actual day of the year varies somewhat from year to year (between January 2nd and January 5th). If my calculations are correct, this year it’s early tomorrow (Jan. 4) morning for Central and Eastern times zones in the U.S. It will be later this evening (Jan. 3) in the Mountain, Pacific, Alaska, and Hawaiian-Aleutian time zones.

I celebrate the new year on the first day of spring.

Wikipedia has a good essay on ‘new year’. Pick whatever calendar you like, there are several. One of my faves:

March – Babylonian New Year began with the first New Moon after the northward equinox. Ancient celebrations lasted for eleven days.

Time keeps on slippin’ into the future.

The Romans just didn’t count months in the winter, and started again at the first New Moon after the days were getting noticeably longer. That’s how they kept a lunar calendar synchronized with the year. Later, they went to a solar calendar by expanding the months to 30 or 31 days, and adding January and February. And that just happen to be where January started.

So now we have Christmas on the 25th, and the beginning of the year on the celebration of Jesus’s circumcision, entirely coincidentally.

Ever wonder why, if the least amount of daylight per day occurs on or around Dec. 21, that isn’t also the coldest day of the year? And June 21 the hottest?

Around here, he have a party for ALL THREE. Solstice, Christmas and New Year!

That was his best response yet.

The solstice, Christmas and New Year’s Day all originally came on the same day. Over nearly 2000 years, various changes to the calendar have spread them out.

It has been celebrated at different times through history, including the beginning of the year in March.

If we used logic in making calendars, we wouldn’t need the “30 days hath November” mnemonic.

No kidding right? I mean that never has made sense to me.It is the hours of light, the Solstice. Good grief! Lol

Exactly—hits home like a sledgehammer instead of a Mallett!

Probably for a reason very similar to why some of us still observe “Old Christmas Day” on January 6, or why eastern Orthodox Christmas is January 7: the gradual shift of the sort-of lunar Julian calendar as compared to the true solar calendar, which defines the seasons. Pope Gregory “fixed” that with his Bull of 1582, which specified the skipping of 10 days, but only a few countries adopted the Gregorian calendar right away. Other countries, who waited longer, had to skip more days – which is why there were riots in England in 1752, demanding the return of their lost eleven days.

TL;DR: a year (one trip around the sun) isn’t an even number of moon cycles long, or weeks, or even days, so things get out of sync.

Yep. It’s weird that the new year has no connection to anything logical. I thought about that a lot this year.

He can find out easily what happened to it.

Not too far in the future (geologically speaking) the revolving of the moon around earth will be slowed down enough so it takes exactly one year for 12 cycles. Any intelligent life on Earth at that time will still complain about the odd number of days the year has then – 317 or whatever, because the planets rotation slows down, too.

For sheer strangeness, remember that we used to change from YEAR to YEAR+1 on March 25th. When the British changed to the Gregorian calendar, Washington’s birthday moved from February 11, 1731 to February 22, 1732.

Blame Pope Gregory, he’s the one who’s credited with the Gregorian calendar we use today. Of course you could also use the Julian calendar which celebrates Christmas on January 7 of the Gregorian calendar.

And don’t forget precession of the earth’s axis: it is like a top starting to wobble as it gets near to tipping over. That is the tilted axis of the earth in this case, and it takes almost 27,000 years to make one wobble. So, right now the geographical north pole of earth is pointing towards Polaris, but it will slowly move away and come back to that point in 27,000 years. So, the dates of the seasons will drift around also, and the ‘Houses of the Zodiac’. I read once upon a time that that stuff was set up long enough ago that ‘your sign’ is actually off by two ‘houses’ now, but just wait about 20,000 years and they will be all OK again. So, something to look forward to!