January '23

Granted, we are not as zealous as the English folk of yore, who celebrated the solstice by erecting monoliths weighing several tonnes using only ropes and boards. We only hope that the effort of the Stonehenge builders was not in vain due to overcast conditions.

The winter solstice is perhaps a more natural beginning of the new year than 1 January, when there are fewer interesting celestial phenomena to be observed than on 21 December. This misalignment has been around since ancient Rome’s celebrations of the god Janus.

The Romans were in general very liberal, if not deliberate, with their approach to time. The length of their months was not fixed but rather determined by politics. It occasionally happened that a powerful politician would, rather than over-serving their mandate, simply extend the duration of their last month in office. This endearing mayhem was rectified by Julius Caesar, who assigned a fixed number of days to each month. Perhaps he would have reconsidered this decision, had he known Brutus’s intentions.

As it turns out, nobody considered the shift of New Year’s celebrations in either direction offensive. And no amount of bickering about this inconsequential scheduling should get in the way of a good celebration of a new terrestrial cycle around the Sun.