Gregorian Calendar (derogatory)

Folks love to hate the New Year.

Louis CK has a joke about how in unison, as a species, we all agreed to say “Jesus + 2”, “Jesus + 3”, “Jesus + 2017, 4 months and 3 days is when your license expires.” And while yes, “measuring most of history backwards on account of one man” is indeed rather ludacris, the reality is this is one of the largest group projects in human history— if not the largest, based on sheer adoption. If you are flying to India, China, Argentina, or Canada you do not have to convert the year. If you are filling out a form you cannot put “Wood Snake” in the line marked “year.” You can ask any human “what year is it?” and the consensus is 2025.

Outside of December and January, when folks will say (or type) the word *Gregorian* as if it’s a curse, it’s rarely complained about any other time. May 31st - June 1st? Whew welcome, June! April 6th to April 7th? Just another day.

We don’t agree on much as humans. How to pray. Who to pray to. What to eat. Who to love. What happens after death. How to allocate our resources. What is art. What shape the Earth is. What we have agreed on, even if begrudgingly, and in the face of most of the aforementioned questions, is how we tell time. There are 24 hours in a day and 365ish days in a year. As a global, interconnected society of 8+ billion humans, adhering to the Gregorian calendar is actually kind of the only thing we all agree on.

Now, sure, the origins are dripping in colonial power. Very briefly: The Julian calendar, (as in Roman Dictator Julius Caesar) had a year length of 365.25 days (one leap day every four years). While this may seem very specific, the actual solar year is closer to 365.2422 days. That created a “drift” of 11 minutes annually. 11 minutes times a few centuries, and hey, our celebrations and feast days (read: Easter) are moving further and further away from their intended positions. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII (hence, Gregorian) commissioned a new calendar to account for this drift. This included a more accurate leap year rule: years divisible by 100 are not leap years unless they are also divisible by 400. (1900, not a leap year. 2000, a leap year.) When the rollout happened, to account for the drift, time was… well… skipped. It went from Thursday, October 4th, 1582, to Friday, October 15th, 1582. Nearly 200 years later, when Britain adopted it, they went from Saturday September 2nd, 1752, to Sunday September 14th, 1752. While feeling like a mighty case of jetlag in a pre-flight world, these shifts, if not annoying and surreal, were probably fine.

Even if we think it’s dumb, or rooted in Christian dominance, or don’t even agree that a solar year is 365.2422 days because the Earth is flat, we all participate in this. Most other things we participate in, at this scale, are thumbs down: human supremacy, capitalism, racism, sexism, etc. Because we agree on so little it can feel, at least to me, difficult to orient to lasting and important change.

Remember the backlash when California and New York tried to ban plastic shopping bags? Or the huge divide that is emerging (at least in America) around food-additives like seed oils or dyes. As I understand it, the polarization is something like: pro regulation/removal: This is maybe poison? We don’t have enough accurate data because it’s cheaper to use most of these ingredients so the companies who profit from their inclusion will skew the results, so maybe we just leave them out? Anti-regulation/removal: You’re a classist hater who wants food to be even more expensive than it already is and you clearly don’t understand chemistry (I don’t understand chemistry either, but that’s beside the point!) Or when the US removed lead from paint in the late 70s, and paint companies tried to downplay how harmful lead was. Or when we all realized that smoking cigarettes was, at the very least, a net-negative for not only smokers, but also for those around smokers and tobacco companies were like LOL OMG you’re being so dramatic and crazy.

For all of the ifs-ands-or-buts about the *lowers voice* Gregorian calendar, I am in awe of it’s more precise leap year rule. Can you imagine a small group of people proposing a simple, elegant solution to a problem that eases the lives of all people for thousands of years to come and then enough of the GLOBAL population decides that yes, even though they may “lose” 11 days of time, and have to switch some documents, this is worth it.

Can you imagine?

Anyways, my sense of the general, modern grumbling is less about religious or colonial neutrialy, and more about how we aren’t very graceful about endings. Or beginnings. Transitions in general, really. Without proper rites of passage, ritual, or ceremony, the ego grips painfully onto the illusions of control, but there is nothing to support any embodiment or integration of a change. This is often why folks feels so deflated a week or so into the ~new~ year as their brilliant blueprint of the new them gets buried deep under their construct or environmental limitations.

The closet many have to a Gregorian New Year’s ritual is having (maybe) a day or so off work, (maybe) getting drunk, and (maybe) staring at a clock for 2-3 minutes prior to midnight. This is hardly enough scaffolding to really turn the proverbial page.

This is part of what I feel around the admittedly awkward timing of the New Year. In the northern hemisphere it's in the middle of the the darkest point. Yes, we're past solstice, the days are getting longer, but in terms of our external world, it’s hardly the beginning of hibernation nor the beginning of the thaw that leads to rebirth. The southern hemisphere is equally as awkward: this is the zenith of summer, everyone drunk on abundance and daylight

When one says “Hey! I’m not subscribing to this silly Gregorian New Year! The culture I associate with didn’t even celebrate the new year on January 1st, they did so at another time!” What I hear is: “Hey, nothing is really available from myself, my community, or the collective right now to support a large transition because we’ve mostly lost touch with rituals and I don’t know how to center myself in a time of transition regardless of what day that may be.” Which, relatable, my friend, relatable.

So, if you’re still feeling rooted in an ending or a middle, rather than a beginning, here is a non-exhaustive list of other days to celebrate a new year on:

Your birthday

Your half-birthday

Jewish New Year (September 22nd)

Tibetan New Year (February 28th)

Chinese New Year (January 29th)

Academic Year (September 2nd)

Zodiac Year (March 20th)

Solstices (June 20th or December 21st)

Equinoxes (March 20th or September 22nd)

Something more akin to how it is decided when Easter will be observed: the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox (April 20th)

Tomorrow (varies)

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