I have a better date for New Year’s Day

Is Jan. 1 the best time for New Year's Day?

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On the first day of 2024 I have a choice. Take this time to get in the first word on what’s in store for this year, or look back on 2023, reflecting on the year gone by? Decisions, decisions. Twenty-twenty-three was Taylor Swift, and a better economy than anyone will admit. But also, MAGA fascism, war, terror and horror on a cataclysmic scale. The new year, thankfully, is still unblemished, like a new jack-in-the-box you got for Christmas. Shiny and fun, and pretty to look at, but deep down we know there’s a hideous clown monster on the inside waiting to pop out.

So instead, I’m going to use my remaining column inches to advocate for the end of New Year’s Day as we know it. But first, it’s time for another trip in the Wayback Machine to understand why Jan. 1 is the first day of the year anyway.

And for that, we have the Romans to thank. Specifically, Julius Caesar who, as Rome’s armies knitted together an empire, found that establishing a common calendar would be an excellent way to assert greater control over local subjects, most of whom had multiple calendars tied to their own holy days. The Julian calendar became the first calendar to be adopted (albeit, at the point of a spear) across multiple nations, and the first month on this new calendar was named after Janus, a god with two faces … one looking forward and one looking back. So, post hoc, ergo prompter hoc, the first day in January became the first day of the year.

Unfortunately, the Julian calendar had some problems with math, as well as problems with the unruly conquered folks. So, when Rome fell and the previously subjugated started monkeying around with the details of the calendar, it looked like the whole thing was going to fall into chaos once again. Luckily, in 1592 Pope Gregory XIII famously invented Leap Years to fix the math, told everyone in Europe to get with the program, and reinforced Jan. 1 as the first day of the year. This newly refreshed calendar was called the Gregorian and that’s the one we’ve used every since.

You can make the case that Jan. 1 was at the time, a good choice for kicking off a new year because of its proximity to the Winter Solstice, the celestial confluence when days start getting longer and the nights shorter. Except years later, humans would discover electricity, ushering in the super abundance of electric light, thereby making the Solstice rationale significantly less important.

So, if we recognize the selection of Jan. 1 as the first day of the year being pretty much an arbitrary shout out to some second-rate Roman deity, reinforced centuries later by a guy with a fancy hat who was tired of having to rearrange his holiday schedule, I’d say it’s high time we looked at changing New Year’s Day to a more practical location. I nominate Sept.1 as our new, New Year’s Day.

Look at it this way, almost everything in the modern world revolves around school schedules and the idea of “summer vacation.” School ends in May or June and the rhythm of the world changes as the Northern Hemisphere shifts into summer. Kids are home, families go on vacation, businesses close or slow down. In the USA, summer unofficially runs until Labor Day when kids go back to school, businesses get back to business and we transition from the lazy, hazy days back to serious mode, so why not make this “summer slowdown” the end of the year instead of the middle?

Look, the universe doesn’t care what day the next year starts. And honestly, doesn’t going back to school or work in September feel like a new beginning anyway? The end of summer, playtime and a return to sobriety? Start slowing down after Memorial Day, kick off summer on July 4, then bring the year to a close with a New Year’s Eve party that doesn’t require freezing or shoveling. Let’s make this happen. Bump Labor Day to Jan. 1 in order to maintain a natural end date for the winter “holiday season,” and make Sept. 1 the new New Year’s Day.