Origins: Got Nytt År!

For thousands of years human beings have recognized an essential peculiarity about time: In some ways it behaves linearly, with event following event into infinity; and in some ways it behaves cyclically, with event repeating event in one great cosmic variation on a theme.

The principal ways in which we reckon time—by days and years—take both into account. Although days follow one another in endless progression, to the last syllable of recorded time, we group them into arbitrary cycles of seven called weeks, which repeat over and over again. And though years march inexorably on,^a century after century, they also have a seasonality, with one summer or winter very much resembling another; the year, that is, has a kind of wholeness, a beginning, middle and end—but especially a beginning, which has been celebrated by almost all peoples almost always.^b

When did human beings begin to consider the first of the year an important date? And how did we get saddled with January 1 as our New Year’s Day—a completely arbitrary date?