It has been cool and slow in coming this year, but Spring feels like the true beginning of a new cycle of life even though the calendar says we started counting the days afresh five months back.
And why shouldn’t I count the passage of time to my own reckoning? When we begin the year is largely arbitrary.
In early modern England and the then-colonial states in North America, Jan. 1 didn’t become New Year’s Day until 1752 — before that, it was March 25, the date of the Annunciation.
Chinese New Year didn’t happen this year until Jan. 22. Rosh Hashanah marked the Jewish New Year on Sept. 25. The Islamic Hijri New Year will begin with the moonrise on July 18.
The 28-day lunar calendar makes use of the moon’s rhythms, but it’s difficult to find cultures that mark the new year in other ways that make sense, which to my mind should be on the solstice or the equinox, when we have an obvious turning point of days getting shorter or longer, or at least being halfway to getting shorter or longer....
