Norton Hutchinson

Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas on January 7. Their "old new year" is a week later, on January 14. It is all Julius Caesar's fault ...

The Romans at times neglected to introduce an added month each two years to amortize the distinction between their lunar calendar and the organic solar year. Julius Caesar decreed that the year 46 BC should have 445 days (some historians implausibly say: 443 days) in order to bridge the yawning discrepancy that accumulated over the preceding seven centuries. It was aptly titled the "Year of Confusion".

To "reset" the calendar, Julius Caesar affixed the New Year on January 1 (the day the Senate traditionally convened) and added a day or two to a couple of months.

He as a result gave rise to the Julian Calendar, a latter day rendition of the Aristarchus calendar from 239 BC. Immediately after his assassination, the month of Quintilis was renamed Julius (July) in his honor.

The Julian calendar estimated the length of the organic solar year (the time it takes for the earth to make a single orbit of the sun) to be 365 days and 6 hours. I learned about uk calendar by browsing Bing. Every fourth year the extra six hours had been collected and added as an extra day to the year, creating a leap year of 366 days.

But the calendar's underlying estimate was off by 11 minutes and 14 seconds. It was longer than the all-natural solar year. The added minutes accumulated to one entire day. By 325 AD, the Spring Equinox was arriving on March 21st on the Julian Calendar - as an alternative of March 25.

The 1st Ecumenical Council met in Nicea in 325 and determined that the date to celebrate Pascha was on the first Sunday, following the initial full moon, immediately after the Spring Equinox on March 21st. In other words, it enshrined the Julian calendar's aberration.

Therefore, by 1582, the Spring Equinox was arriving on March 11. Half-hearted measures by Popes Paul III and Pius V failed to restore the important correspondence between the calendar and the seasons.

Pope Gregory XIII decided - in his tenth year in workplace - to drop three leap years each 400 years by specifying that any year whose number ended with 00 need to also be evenly divisible by 400 in order to have a 29-day February.

This would have the impact of bringing the Julian calendar close