At 9:58 AM CST the sun will reach the Tropic of Capricorn on its southward journey and then begin its way back north towards the Tropic of Cancer. Daylight hours will begin to lengthen in the Northern Hemisphere and shorten in the land Down Under.
I wonder why our year doesn't coincide with an annual solar event.
It seems to me that the year should begin or end on an annual solar or astronomic event. Why don't we begin the year on the December Solstice?
Who decided to just pick a day--say around 10 days later--to begin the calendar year?
Why not wait a few days later when the Earth reaches perihelion--its closest to the sun point in its annual orbit?
That day should always be "Sun"day and should always be January 1st. That would mean that every holiday and every calendar date would always fall on the same day of the week. That would certainly make long range planning easier.
Just some silly thoughts that roll around in my head from time to time.
In any case, I'm always good with a little more sunshine.
Happy Solstice Day!
John
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I found this. There are other explanations but I don't think anyone really knows.
ReplyDelete"The calendar we use has its origins in ancient Rome, even before the Republic.
The original calendar was based on the farm-to-market cycle. It had an eight-day week, with market day at the end of the week. There were 38 such weeks. The cycle began a bit before the start of spring and ran until after the harvest. The winter period wasn’t counted as part of the calendar.
Eventually, they added two new months, January and February, to cover the winter period and they became part of the calendar. At the time, though, intercalation (the correction we currently do with leap year) was handled differently. Years were only 355 days, and every few years they added an extra month (Mercedonius) to bring things back in line.
The years were named for the consuls who served, and at some point they started appointing them at the end of the market year (the end of December). After a while, people started thinking of the years as starting in January, when the new consuls were appointed. Eventually, Julius Caesar made a calendar reform that gave us most of our familiar calendar (the difference being a simpler leap year rule that was corrected in the Gregorian calendar).
So the calendar wasn’t really meant to coincide with astronomical events, like the equinoxes or solstices. It started when farmers were able to start bringing stuff to market—a bit before the spring equinox. It got shifted to January for primarily political convenience."