Word Play: The complicated calendar

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, January 10th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next, the first Wordplay for 2025, first one of the new calendar year.

Today, George Grant considers ideas of a different sort, the history of calendars.

SOUND: NEW YEARS COUNTDOWN

GEORGE GRANT: Have you ever wondered why we celebrate the New Year in January? Why should the year begin for the Northern Hemisphere in the dead of winter? Why not in the Springtime as leaves begin to appear again in the trees and the flowers begin to bud? The answer is perhaps surprising—and more than a little complicated.

There are about forty different calendar systems currently in use in the world. Some of these systems replicate astronomical cycles according to fixed rules, others are based on abstract, perpetually repeating cycles of no astronomical significance. Some carefully enumerate every unit of passing time, others contain structural ambiguities and discontinuities.

The common theme of each system is the desire to organize the calendar to satisfy the needs and presuppositions of society. Besides serving the obvious practical purposes, this process of organization provides a sense, however illusory, of understanding and managing time itself. Thus, calendars have provided the basis for planning agricultural, hunting, and migration cycles, for divination and prognostication, and for maintaining cycles of religious and civil events. Whatever their scientific sophistication, or lack thereof, calendars are essentially social covenants, not scientific measurements.

In 46 BC, Julius Caesar inaugurated a new calendaring system starting in January, a month named for the mythical god of beginnings, Janus. But the system made the year too long by several minutes—thus adding nearly a day each century. So, in 1582 Gregory XIII resolved to correct the problem by introducing a new calendar and issuing a bull requiring all Catholic countries to follow October 4 with October 15 that year. By the end of the 20th century, most of the world had conformed their civil calendars to the Gregorian reforms. But, other calendars still persist.

In 2025, Chinese New Year, or Chūnjié, will be celebrated on January 29. The Islamic New Year, or Hijri, is on June 25. The Eastern Orthodox New Year, or Ras el-Seni, is on January 14. For Coptic Christians, the New Year, or Nayrouz, is celebrated on September 11. The Jewish New Year, or Rosh Hashanah, is on September 22. Some Celtic traditions still celebrate the New Year on Samhain, this year on October 31, while others celebrate it on Hen Galan, January 13.

What a mess, huh? Things can get rather chaotic when we try to pinpoint exact dates in history. There are inevitable contradictions and variations—not necessarily because people have remembered wrongly, but because they have remembered differently. Like languages, vocabularies, and grammars, calendars are worldview projects. And as Francis Schaeffer reminded us, “Worldviews matter. Ideas have real world consequences.”

In any case, happy New Year—whenever it is you celebrate it.

I’m George Grant

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