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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)

#4

Post by shalmanese »

dang wrote: post #3

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.

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

#5

Post by aebtebeten »

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.

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

#8

Post by skissane »

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 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...

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

#9

Post by skissane »

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)

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