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

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

#11

Post by jltsiren »

aebtebeten wrote: post #5

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 d…

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.

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

#12

Post by icegreentea2 »

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.

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

#13

Post by matthewdgreen »

skissane wrote: post #9
globular-toast wrote: post #6

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 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.

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

#14

Post by neilwilson »

skissane wrote: post #8
aebtebeten wrote: post #5

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 d…

> 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 St…

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.

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

#16

Post by gardenhedge »

skissane wrote: post #9
globular-toast wrote: post #6

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 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)

A lot of advantages... Such as?

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

#17

Post by argiopetech »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #13
skissane wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

#18

Post by mistrial9 »

Dolototo wrote: post #15

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.

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

#19

Post by matthewdgreen »

argiopetech wrote: post #17
matthewdgreen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#20

Post by PopAlongKid »

aebtebeten wrote: post #5

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 d…

>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.

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