On another thread handy said “Won’t be long before someone asks why it’s (Christmas) on dec 25th rather than Jan 1st”. He was referring to the fact that it gets asked every year. So I’ll get it over with and add a twist.
When they were making the calendar, why did they not just put the first of the year on what is now December 25th? Why did they make them exactly a week apart? If there had been unions back then, I would suspect they had a hand in this.
Because then I’d be really pissed. It’s bad enough being born on New Year’s Day. I’d hate to be born on New Year’s Day AND Christmas.
Well, the actual solstice is on the 21st of December.
Christmas comes closer than Jan 1st, but they both miss.
Christmas Day and New Year’s Day are both holy days in the Catholic Church.
New Year’s Day is now officially called the Solemnity of Mary, but it used to be the Feast of the Circumcision, marking the day that the infant Jesus would have been circumcised under Jewish law.
I don’t know when, but the name of the day was changed. January 1 is one of those holy days that a lot of Catholics skip.
I’ll have to hunt around for cotes to this but I thought that there was some evidence that Jesus wasn’t born in December but rather March (or some other time…I forget when). Christmas got placed where it did because there were really no suitable religious holidays in that ‘area’ of the calendar. Also, being near the darkest, coldest days of winter a little pick-me-up seemed in order so Christmas got placed in December. January 1 (as the first of the year) was already there…it was Christmas that came afterwards.
That may all sound a little wonky and without cites it’s BS to most of you but I’ll see what I can dig up. Still, I stand by my recollection of that being at least one possible explanation.
Dec 25 was a pagen holiday called “Natalis Solis Invincti” and the RCH pulled the old “If ya can’t beat em, join em” trick.
I guess the mentality was, “Put our holiday on the same day as the pegans and we’ll over shadow it.”
The time around December 25 was a well-established holiday in many heathenish religions; the Romans, for example, celebrated the day of Sol Invictus, the invincible Sun God, on that day because nights are beginning to get shorter and days to get longer again. Throughout Christian history, the Christmas date has switched several time from date to date until at some point of time one agreed to fix it on where it now is.
The calendar we now use was not created by Christians (although Christians did reform it; you know, the big 1582 calendar reform) but by the Romans. They used, btw, to begin their year on March 1 (which is why the months from September to December are called that: septem = 7, and it’s the 7th month after March, and so on). They switched to January 1 well before the birth of the Saviour.
Well, as one might suspect I was partly right and partly wrong. According to this page Jesus was born on January 6. It was the Emperor Constantine who moved Christmas to December 25 as a political move to keep various groups in line. The page also nicely describes the frequent intermixing of various religions and pagan ceremonies that get absorbed over time so what you may think of as uniquely christian is in fact an amalgam of other religious practices from history.
The tradition of starting the New Year on January 1st was inaugurated by the Romans–Julius Caesar’s Julian calendar had Jan. 1 as the first day of the year. So Jan. 1 was New Year’s before there were Christians.
Christians, however, didn’t want a pagan start to the New Year, and so around 650 they started using Christmas as the legal New Year’s kickoff. Later on in the Middle Ages, there was a fad for using the Feast of the Annuciation, March 25th, as the start of the New Year instead. This fad spread throughout Europe, but then died out. England, however, stuck with March 25th for a long, long time…until 1752, in fact. That’s right, when Ben Franklin and George Washington were young, the official New Year’s Day was in March.
(But not the popular New Year. Ordinary folks still celebrated the New Year on January 1st, caring not a whit that it was a pagan holiday. The March 25th date was used mainly by the government. Eventually, governments all went back to using the traditional Roman Jan. 1 date.)
For more info on this tangled subject:
http://www.genfair.com/dates.htm
http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/home/scotland/time2.html
This still leaves the OP’s original question, though it is perhaps better asked as, “Why did the Romans choose January 1st as their New Year’s Day instead of December 25, the festival of Natalis Solis Invincti?”
This concerns the dating of Christmas more than New Years–
Here’s entry in the Catholic Encylopedia (best on-line source for quick information on Christian history) for Christmas
There is considerable disagreement and it’s generally accepted that we don’t know when Jesus was actually born. Taking the evidence only from the gospels, one pertinent question is whether the Romans would have held a census in winter or would have cared (travel was more difficult, but the fields did not need to be worked). Another is whether the shepherds would be likely to be sleeping out with their flocks at night during winter – maybe they didn’t do it regularly, or maybe that particular night was milder.
Makes sense to not have it in spring though, since it could end up being on Easter (whose date is well-verified).