My question for the day today was driven by the fact that in looking at all the dates leading up to the new year, I kept coming across that that new year hasn't always been on January 1st. And that in some major countries, it hasn't be the start of the new year till as recently as 1912. It surprised me. I know from my studies in school that the calendars were not always the same, but it surprised me a bit to learn just how recently many people throughout the world were not on the same calendar. It seems like it would be impossible to work in this modern world if we weren't all on the same calendar page. So I wanted to share with you what I did learn about the calendar we use today.
This calendar is called the Gregorian calendar. An Italian doctor named Aloysius Lilius helped come up with the calendar basing it in part on the Julian calendar. It became an official calendar when Pope Gregory XIII (ah - the name Gregorian!) decreed it as such in 1582. But not everyone started to use it right away. It is a complicated calendar meant to keep the days within the year in relation to the solar cycles. That is why we have leap years, to keep the calendar on schedule. It takes 146,097 days to complete an entire cycle, which happens to be every 400 years. The number of days per month, as you know, are not all the same, unlike some other calendars before.
The purpose of the change in calendar was to have everyone use the same day for Easter agreed upon by the First Council of Nicea. Due to the variances in calendars, Easter had begun to drift over the centuries to wind up falling past a time that was acceptable to the Catholic church. At the Council of Trent in 1563, a plan was put forth to correct these calendar problems. First, the solar year had to be calculated accurately. Then, the problem of drift had to be corrected. The Julian calendar had a leap year every 1 in 4, but this caused a problem. It turns out that to stay on track, slightly less than 1 in 4 needs to be used to make it work. So they used a system of 400 years where every year divisible by 100 was a leap year only if it was also divisible by 400 (1900 was not a leap year, but 2000 was). This means that there are leap days added only 97 years out of 400. At this point, it is the most accurate calendar we have to keep the cycle as close to the solar cycle as possible, but there is still drift involved, and then we have to add leap seconds as well.
Whew! That was a lot of information. Now, here is the German connection: a man named Christopher Clavius, born in Bamberg, was a mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic monk serving in Rome. It was his research and then the technical writing that he used to defend that research (all 800 pages!) that allowed this new calendar to be accepted and used.
In order to correct for the drift to this point, the year 1582 lost 10 days. The old Julian calendar ended on October 4th (a Thursday) and the new calendar started on October 15th (a Friday). The church adopted it immediately, but mostly this affected Rome and strictly Catholic countries. It took some time for many other countries to adopt it. Some non-Catholic countries were suspicious of the calendar, thinking it was a way to trick the countries into adhering to the Church. The catholic regions were much more willing to make the change, but for some parts of protestant Germany, it was not adopted until 1700. In Sweden, the year 1712 actually had a February 30th, due to the failed gradual implementation of the new calendar. They went back to the original calendar that year with the addition of that extra day. In 1753, they finally officially adopted this new calendar. It was not until 1867 that Alaskans and the United States adopted the calendar when it coincided with a movement of the International Date Line and the purchase of Alaska from the Russians. For Alaska, this resulted in a repeat to one of their days. And in Russia, it was not adopted until the Russian Revolution in 1917. It was actually enacted in early 1918. Greece was the last European country to adopt it in 1923.
People who are governed by eastern Orthodox churches are not all on the Gregorian calendar. Those people still celebrate Christmas on the 25th of December of the Julian calendar, which until 2100 will fall on January 7th.
So how did we get January 1st as the start of the year? Ancient Roman calendars started the year on March 1st. Then, the Roman Empire changed this to be the day politicians entered office: either May 1st or at some point later March 15th. This was eventually moved to January 1st with the Julian calendar. During the middle ages, though, many countries used a religious festival to mark the date, ranging from Dec 25th, March 1st, March 25th, Easter or Sept. 1. In England, the legal year began on March 25th until 1751. From a historical point of view, this can cause some discrepancy in the history books. However, starting in 1522, Europe began the move to have January 1st as New Year's Day with England bringing up the rear.
Many calendars have been used to predict the future. The most famous one making media sensation these days is the Mayan calendar that some believe predicts the end of the world as of Dec. 21st, 2012. My astrological calendar today says that if I work more, I'll earn more (is that really a prediction???) But I know a very good secret. The Gregorian calendar can be used to predict the future as well. It says that two days from today will be Sunday, December 21st, 2008 in most parts of the world. Yep - and I am pretty certain that December 21st will be Sunday. Ah - predictions I can count on!!
I, like you, will be taking a break into the new year. I will resume my writings when the holiday break is over for us and will post my next blog entry on January 7th. Wow - it is hard to believe that we will be in the year 2009!!
The words for the day are calendar: der Kalender (pronounced as we say it), day: der Tag (tahg), week: die Woche (voch eh - cat sound again) and month: der Monat (mo naht where the "o" is a long O).
The question for the day (and the year, I guess!) is "So why is Sunday, December 21st, so important to Germans anyway?"
Fröhliche Weihnachten und einen guten Rutsch!
Frau Spitzer
