828. 2022 - A New Year. Hopefully a new commitment.

Happy New Year's Day! New Year's Day, for most of us, tends to fall in the middle of the actual year in our minds, which in the U. S. of A. runs from about Labor Day to about July 4th (or honestly, to about the next Labor Day).

Over the millennia, different cultures have begun the year at what would now be considered "days other than New Year's Day." Most of those celebrations are tied to a New Moon, a Full Moon, an Equinox, or a Solstice. Later religions created their own holidays and Holy Days around those same days. Thus we get the Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashanah tied to the Passover which is related to both a New Moon and an Equinox. Christians mark our most important day, Easter, by the first Full Moon after the Vernal Equinox. And the Bible tells us that the death and resurrection of Christ happened during the week of the Jewish Passover. So there's potentially a double calculation involved, which then requires church synods to "set the date" for the Resurrection much as they did for Christmas.

Nations have created their own laws as to when the New Year begins although January 1st has come to be accepted as the most universal date. Until 1752, the British Empire used March 25 as the beginning of the New Year, which seems like an arbitrary date. Some earlier Roman kingdoms used the birthday of the Emperor Caesar Augustus, the great ruler during the times of the Pax Romana, which coincided with much of the life of Christ, as New Year's Day. Emperor Augustus was born on September 23, a singularly important day in my life, and one often associated with the Autumnal Equinox.

As my regular readers know, this page marks the Full Moons as well as the Equinoxes and Solstices. Full Moons are a monthly occurrence and the words "moon" and "month" ultimately derive from the same linguistic root, -me-, meaning "to measure." Other words in that family of words include meter, dimension, meal, menopause, Monday, commensurate, and the musical metronome.

Pictured is the calendar for this year's Full Moons, the first of which will mark another important date in my family, my brother's 60th Birthday.

Happy 2022.

© Jeff Noble, Louisville, Kentucky, January 1, 2022.