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.
Arbitrary? I find it to be highly logical.
You wouldn't get much of a Christmas vacation then would you?
>Ancient people (just like us)
Exactly.
All the equinoxes and solstices are celebrated there. The winter solstice is named Yalda Night, which was a few nights ago and Christmas may be related to this astronomical event. There is also Mehran and Tirgan. Ancients did like to get together and party.
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.
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...
Hence why the British tax year still starts on April 6th in the “new” Gregorian calendar.
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.
This, at least, narrows it down a bit.
I'm often the same way. After Presidents Day (US) I want to skip ahead to spring.
In the days before everyone had clocks and calendars, perhaps this was be easier to determine than the shortest day.
* Chinese et al have entered the chat
This pattern is fairly common around the world.
It's amusing to me that in the Western world, the original Latin designations are off by two as we moved the start month but never adjusted the corresponding month numbers (so DECember (10) = 12, etc).
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 said, I think any effort to coerce the global community into some shared holiday would be much more divisive than unifying.
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)
Maybe it succeeded because it's not tied to an astronomical phenomenon, and so we aren't tempted to botch it with "leap days" and whatnot.
Some advice from Mr Costa: Six cups of eggnog Makes my nose rosy red And it get me in the Christmas mood
