January 1st is arbitrary; so Why Celebrate?

Recently, I was having a discussion with my brother in law concerning celebrating New Year’s Day. He, always the contrarian, argued that it is almost meaningless: January 1st is an arbitrary date to start our revolution around the sun, itself being an arbitrary correction to the arbitrary construction of the ancient Western calendars, which in turn are themselves more or less made up of arbitrary methods, times, and metrics by which to measure the passage of time. On this logic, January 1st is really nothing more than a shared or agreed upon (by some) construct, a fancy or convenient time marker to put off self-improvement and make half-hearted resolutions for betterment. While practical necessity would, therefore, require some nominal acknowledgement of the turning into the new calendar so as not to miss tax season, personal and societal celebrations in the form of parties are simply excuses for carousing. There is no objective truth being marked; we would simply be celebrating an arbitrary decision of some majority born of history and subject to change at the whims of the populace.

Now, I have not done justice to the well-articulated argument my brother in law gave. Nor would I be fair to him if I did not acknowledge that this argument was, in large part, him taking advantage of my lack of sleep and argumentative nature so as to egg me on and get a rise out of me. Which he in fact succeeded in doing, I might add. So I put in this write-up a sort of disclaimer on his behalf: not only are the reasons I have given here not strictly precise presentations of his position, but he himself does not hold them as strictly true. My brother in law is definitely one for large gatherings, whatever the excuse.

Disclaimers aside, his position (even for the sake of mere contrarian argument) does bring up some fair criticisms of celebrating New Year’s. Why put off bettering oneself for an arbitrary day - a practice most abandon before the first month’s close? Why are we bound by the arbitrary choices of some distant majority to this day - and can we not try to change the calendar? For that matter, since we are constantly coming out with new and improved methods of tracking the earth’s rotation around the sun (metric of days), and have come to new light on the precise date of the Birth of Christ (metric of years), are we actually not then bound to review our current system and update it to reflect objective truth? Why do we gather to celebrate what we now know is a lie: the beginning of a year we say is 2026 years from the Incarnation, which in fact is somewhere in the range of 2020-2024 years from the event? The answer to all of these questions lies in a single and important factor in the human existence: the influence of human praxis on reality and the individual.

Human praxis is a pretty specific term, but generally (were I to paraphrase it), it simply means human activity, work, or decisions. More strictly, it would apply to culture-building functions, but really all activities fall under this term in one way or another. Human praxis is to humanity what the egg is to chickens: the egg must exist for the chicken to hatch, and yet the chicken must exist to lay the egg. Which came first; which continues to come first? In a precisely similar manner, humans are formed by their culture and their environment; Man makes decisions based on the data he receives and influences he experiences from the surrounding world and trusted advisors. However, that environment, culture, and influence is actually a product of his own action! To use an example I use with a former Squad Leader of mine: I cannot just drop and do 100 pushups at any given time. And, if I do not perform the number of pushups when I am asked, my life would be pretty terrible. But given time, and influenced by the desire not to rile my superiors to ire (thereby causing myself more anguish), I can practice at pushups. By this action, I not only introduce something that was not there before (ability to do 100 pushups), but also increase my desire to do pushups (because they come easily now), which in turn influences my superior’s assessment of me, which causes me to again seek to do even better. In other words, by acting thus, Man changes or conforms the environment around him; he changes or conforms himself to that environment or culture by living within it. 

All this to say: just because something was arbitrary at one point, or continues to be arbitrary to this day, does not make it bad, ill-informed, or even optional. In fact, the opposite is many times true: changing something merely on the basis of its being arbitrary, or on the grounds that it was decided long ago by someone you don’t know is many times way more damaging to those individuals involved than it is helpful. Besides: such a decision or attempt at affecting immediate corrections to reflect a technical discovery (such as the real Incarnation not being 2026 years ago) all but actually misses the point of the metric in the first place. Saying that it is the year AD 2026 is not intended to actually inform us of when Christ was really Born. It’s not an instructional tool. The point of the Gregorian calendar is to remember, whether technically accurate or not, that we in the Western World view the Incarnation as the center of history. In that way, the technical accuracy of our calendar is secondary to the metric by which we reference.

You need to start somewhere. Every day, we assess ourselves, see our environments, and either lament our lots in life or appreciate where we are. We try to act in ways that better or benefit ourselves, changing or conforming with our surroundings and our inclinations. But we have to start somewhere. And in the never-ending march of time towards our own demise, January 1st is as good a place as any to begin affecting change in our lives. Better than most, even: it has the benefit of being a larger societal timemark of new beginnings. And humans, being corporeal creatures, are already hard-wired to commemorate, celebrate, and acknowledge the passage of time through holidays, calendars, etc. So, while there is no problem with beginning a self-improvement activity on any given day of any given year, New Year’s Day as decided upon January 1st has a built-in impetus to kick you off.

So, when it’s all said and done, who really cares whether January 1st of 2026 is really the technical beginning of a new year which is exactly 2026 years from the Incarnation? That’s not the point of our calendar, even though it was the aim of those constructing it. They did exactly as we all do: the best they could to accurately reflect the goal they had. And who knows? Maybe this year we will find new evidence that Christ was born precisely when our current calendar says He was! Either way, I don’t think that’s the point, nor is it a reason to avoid celebrating or making a resolution for 2026. There is a saying I am fond of: do what you’ve always done, get what you’ve always gotten. Your actions precede you; you follow your actions. If you want to see change in your life, January 1st is a good a time as any - and again, better than most - to begin. The only time better to affect change is right now, whenever that might be. So, while you shouldn’t use an upcoming holiday to excuse your already bad behavior, marking its proximity and linking your efforts to larger new beginnings is definitely helpful. 

Mary, Mother of Our Lord, pray for us!