Easing into the New Year

Janus, the two-faced god. — Public domain

Like two-faced Janus, god of thresholds, soon we’ll be looking back over the year just past and forward to a new year that comes bearing who-knows-what.

We find it all quite ordinary that the calendar year should begin a week after Christmas, bringing an end to the holiday revels and a return to more sober lifestyles. Instead of Christmas cards, you’ll soon be getting greetings from your Uncle Sam and credit card bills representing the inevitable hangover that follows holiday bingeing.

New Year’s Day in our time is a bracing sort of occasion, a day of reckoning. Not only do we force ourselves to review our personal failings and resolve to fix them, but we face the bitterest days of winter, dark, cold and shivery. Hesiod, author of the ancient book “Works and Days,” had January pegged.

Beware the month: bad days

That would take the hide off an ox...

Boreas, the north wind, blows over the land

And the earth and the forest groan,

And all the innumerable trees are loud with him.

All true — please throw another log on the fire and toss me an afghan.

The New Year would have an entirely different tenor if we marked it, as mankind did through untold millennia, not after the winter solstice festivals but at the vernal equinox with spring at hand. This scheme coincides with the cycles of Nature, and made good sense to the ancient Persians and Egyptians, among others.

Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. revised the calendar and officially proclaimed Jan. 1 as the start of the new year, but most of the world simply ignored him. The agricultural year still commenced on the spring equinox — March 25 through the Middle Ages — and the ecclesiastical calendar of the Christian church agreed, reinforcing the old ways.

It wasn’t until the late 1500s that Jan. 1 gained greater legitimacy to its claim as New Year’s Day. On March 1 of 1582, after months of debate by learned astronomers, Pope Gregory XIII announced a new reform of the calendar that introduced the leap year gambit to keep the calendar in sync with the sun.

The Western world still uses this calendar, observing Jan. 1 as the first day of the new year, but it wasn’t accepted without a fuss in some quarters. Protestant countries considered the new calendar a tainted Papist document, and Puritan England rejected it out of hand, refusing to surrender the March 25 date until 1753.

Make some noise to greet the New Year. — Ricky Leong/Flickr

It must have been quite a paradigm shift, wrenching those New Year’s thoughts from the awakening of spring to a point barely a week past the winter solstice. I imagine the only consolation was that the solstice represented the point in the astronomical year after which the sun grows stronger and the days measurably longer. In other words, it comes when we are finally and safely beyond the year’s darkest day.

I rather like the old deal, when at New Year’s we might have been eagerly shedding our heavy coats and thinking about how soon we might till and sow — nice, workman-like words for playing in the dirt. Instead, we’re trolling in the mailbox for the first garden catalogs, the only concrete sign of spring we’ll see for months.

There’s no looking back, though, since the old calendars now lie in the dustbin of history. About all you can do now to honor the old ways is to improve your chances for good luck in the new year by taking care of business as dictated by ancient superstition:

Settle your bad debts and reconcile any estrangements before the year ends. Make noise at midnight to greet the new year and chase away evil spirits. Have money in your pockets as the old year passes into the new and drain the bottle of spirits to its final drop. None of this is bad advice, you notice.

The new year is at hand, but what comes next seems like an enforced suspension of our customary to-ing and fro-ing. This might not be a bad thing, given the depletion of our bank balances and our urge to party. January gives us permission to stop acting like social butterflies and hibernate like the bears in a warm den.

There is a hush to the world in winter, a vast silence good for quiet contemplation. The austerity of the landscape is mind-clearing and in its own way beautiful, like a pen-and-ink drawing. After the hurry and bustle of the end-of-year holidays, there is suddenly time to spare, time to plan, time to nap.

An artist friend of mine claims that January and February are the natural months to retreat from the world and seek inspiration. In the beginning of the year, in the frozen heart of winter, our labors can be work of the mind and spirit. Imagine how you would like to shape the next twelve-month span and rest easy — change your mind every day, if you like.

The time is not yet ripe to go and do. Strangely enough, there’s comfort in that.