This is part seven of the “Twelve Posts of Christmas,” a series exploring twelve traditions of the Christmas season.
Ah, New Year’s Eve. In the U.S., a day marked by popping champagne, listening to mediocre performances on live TV, and watching a glittering disco ball glide down a pole. Lest I forget — smooching strangers is on that list as well, somehow.
Have you ever stopped to ponder: Who decides when a year begins and a year ends, anyhow? At midnight tonight, we will be celebrating the commencement of 2024. Two-thousand and twenty-four years since . . . when? (“Easy! The birth of Christ!”) Well, kind of. Stay tuned.
Our current calendar, with its recognizable 12 months — one of them shorter than the rest — and a leap year every four years, takes its form from the Julian Calendar. Proposed by the famed Julius Caesar in the year 46 BC, the system has largely held steady for two millennia.
(“But wait, you just said “BC”! You don’t mean to say that Julius Caesar predicted the birth of Christ when he set forth his calendar?”)
Here comes the complicated bit — the first users of the Julian Calendar, if they referred to a year at all, would have referred back to Ab urbe condita — “in the year since the city’s founding,” referring, of course, to the founding of Rome, which took place 2,776 years ago. (Thus, using the AUC metric, we are currently living in the year 2776.)
It wasn’t until a sixth-century monk came along, Dionysius Exiguus, that the familiar dating schema, Anno Domini, emerged. Dionysius equated the year of Christ’s birth, 1 AD, to the year 754 Ab urbe condita, and so he began the dating schema of the Christian Era. The exact methods Dionysius used to calculate the year of the birth of Christ remain vague, although he likely matched testimony from the Gospel of Luke to the reign of Caesar Augustus and worked from there.
For most of human history, the numerical year was not particularly important — the reign of a sovereign or a major historical event were the preferred touchstones to mark the passage of time. Monthly calendars were necessary to calculate the day of particular celebrations — whether pagan feasts or liturgical holy days.
(“So, we currently use the Julian Calendar according to the years set forth by Dionysius Exiguus?”) Not exactly.
In the 16th century, Pope Gregory XIII issued a decree that addressed a seemingly small problem with the Julian Calendar. The Julian Calendar assumed that the sun’s circuit is exactly 365.25 days (thus providing a leap year every four years). In actuality, the sun takes 365.2422 days to complete its path.
While this differential — only eleven minutes or so — may seem too trivial to matter, those 11 minutes morphed the calendar after several centuries. The dates were straying farther away form the solar markers of time, such as the Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice. When Renaissance scholars took notice of this issue, they learned that the Julian Calendar was over-correcting by approximately eight days each millennium.
I will let a scholar from Nottingham explain this to you further:
A solution was hit upon whereby centenary years would not be leap years unless they were divisible by 400. This meant that three out of four centenary years would not be leap years, or, that in every 400 years there would not be 100 leap years but 97. Using this calculation meant that there would only be an over-correction of 23 seconds, and that it would take 3,700 years before the over-correction amounted to a full day.
In 1582 Pope Gregory ruled that this new calendar — thereafter called the Gregorian Calendar — should be brought into use. By that stage, the Julian Calendar had added ten days too many to the calendar, so Pope Gregory decreed that the day after the 4th of October 1582 should be the 15th of October 1582, thus correcting the error.
Yes, you read that correctly. In the year 1582, Catholic Christendom hopped from October 4 to October 15 overnight to correct the languishing problem of misconstrued time.
If you thought the calendar couldn’t get more confusing, you’re wrong! To make matters worse, many nations around the globe did not adopt the Gregorian Calendar until centuries after 1582. For hundreds of years, nations were operating ten calendar days apart. (Pity the historians who have to track such discrepancies.) Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden did not transition to the Gregorian calendar until 1700. Great Britain and (what is now) the United States followed suit in 1752, and Eastern countries including China, Turkey, and Russia did not switch until the early 20th-century.
In short, the monthly calendar — which is now, for the most part, ubiquitous — was founded by a pope, and the schema we use to number years was designed by a monk. (And who said the Church was anti-science?)
And so, when the clock strikes midnight tonight, that twisting history of date alterations and civic decrees will bring us to the year 2024 AD. But how did we come to celebrate New Year’s Eve in the first place?
In Catholic, Anglican, and (some) Lutheran churches — the 31st of December is honored as Saint Sylvester’s Day. The feast day of the 4th-century pope is also called, simply, “Silvester” in many regions of Europe.
His feast day falls on his burial date of December 31, burial dates being a traditional day of commemoration in Early Church calendars. In other words, Saint Sylvester was not especially chosen to “ring in the New Year.” Rather, long-standing celebrations of Silvester qua Silvester often merged into secular celebrations of the calendar change.
The legacy of Pope Saint Sylvester I, who served as Bishop of Rome from 314–335 AD, is marked by his role in merging the spiritual realm of the Catholic Church into the political kingdom of the Holy Roman Empire. According to semi-mythical hagiography, Pope Sylvester converted and baptized Constantine the Great, the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity (and then cured him of leprosy for good measure). The pope is also said to have conquered the great heresy of Arianism at the Council of Nicaea — the council which produced the Nicene Creed, the fundamental statement of Christian beliefs. (In actuality, the pope was not present at the council, but his dutiful legates were.)
Unfortunately, the authoritative historical record on the life and work of the fourth-century pope offers slim pickings. Whether or not he personally baptized Constantine the Great, Pope Sylvester certainly played a role in warming relations between the Empire of Rome and the Catholic Church. He also oversaw the construction of magnificent cathedrals, many of which can still be visited today in Rome: the Lateran Basilica, Santa Croce, and Old St. Peter’s Basilica (which has since been replaced by the current massive, marbled structure that screams, “The Vatican.”) Notoriously, the early pope helped pass a law which prohibited Jews from settling in Jerusalem — an act which has made the celebration of Silvester (along with the secular New Year) in Israel unpopular to this day.
While you drink your bubbly and fiddle with cable television tonight, remember: Even time itself is marked by the arbitrary movements of human hands. Cheers to the New Year!