New Year: its origin and why it was previously celebrated in March

Although in most Western cultures the arrival of the New Year’s celebrated with great pomp the night between December 31st and January 1stin Europe it has not always been like this, starting from the New Year’s Eve occurred in a different month.

The future of the celebration of New Year’s It has undergone variations throughout history, depending on the various calendars used by civilizations.

Measuring time using calendars has been a long-standing practice for at least 10,000 years, with different methods used by different cultures. For example, the Mesolithic people of Great Britain followed the phases of the moon as a time reference.

Instead, the ancient Egyptians They looked at him Sun. For their part, the Chinese They combined both methods in a lunisolar calendar which is still used today.

Why was New Year celebrated in March?

According to National Geographic, the first version of the Roman calendar I was only 10 months old. Year started in March (Marzio) e finished in December (December), as it was associated with the agricultural cycleswhich marks the beginning of the planting and harvesting season.

When the harvest ended, the calendar also ended; The winter months were simply not recorded and had no name.

He Roman calendar initial included six months of 30 days and four of 31 days. The first four months were named after deities such as Juno (June) and the last six were numbered consecutively in Latin, such as September, which takes its name from the Latin word for seven, September.

When did we start celebrating New Year’s Eve on December 31st?

In the 7th century BC one of the kings of Rome, Numa Pompilius, created calendar changes. He added 50 days and borrowed one day from each of the 10 existing months to create January (Ianuarius) and February (Februarius).

This new one calendar It wasn’t perfect, as it was based on the moon and not the sun and wasn’t aligned with the seasons it was supposed to mark.

This is why in 45 BC Julius Caesar called for a reformed version which became known as Julian calendar, which began to New Year’s He January 1st.

The Julian calendar remained practically the same until 1582, the year in which Pope Gregory XIII made some changes to more accurately reflect the amount of time it takes the Earth to rotate around the sun.

He Gregorian calendar it has 365 days with a leap year every four years and starts January 1st.

Although in the present Most countries in the world use Gregorian calendarthere are different cultures that recognize different dates as the beginning of the new year such as the Persian Nowruz which is celebrated in Iran coinciding with the spring equinox, the Jewish Rosh Hashanah or the Chinese New Year.