New Year’s Thought

I don’t have anything deep today. Just this: Why the hell is the new year celebrated on January 1?

I mean, really. Why? It’s the middle of winter.

First day of Spring (rebirth) would be a nice day for a new year.

How about one of the solstices. Either the shortest day or the year or the longest one. Or why not even one of the two equinoxes, when day and night are equal length?

We celebrate this day as New Year’s Day because that’s how the Romans set it way back when.

Tradition. Because it’s been done that way for so long. Just because.

My point? Not much of one, except to say to those who want to take a dump on Christian holidays because they correspond to pagan ones: Shut up.

You see, we’re already celebrating plenty of things on completely ridiculous days. I didn’t hear any complaints when George Washington’s birthday and Abraham Lincoln’s birthday got lumped together on a single day called President’s Day. Random.

Does anybody bitch that Valentine’s Day, which is thoroughly secular in today’s times, has at least part of its origins in an attempt to supercede the Roman (and pre-Roman) celebration of Lupercalia? Hell, we don’t even know which martyr/saint by the name of Valentine was the inspiration, really. It might not have even been the one reportedly buried on February 14.

Christian holidays, like Christmas for example, got picked for reasons that made sense at the time, and are in many cases justifiable reasons. That these reasons don’t always correspond to the actual date or significance of the event (when Jesus was actually born, for example) doesn’t diminish them.

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