It’s a New Year Because the Calendar Says So

In case you hadn’t noticed, the holidays are over and it’s 2026.

It’s a new year, an empty slate, a chance to start over and make resolutions. Probably the best news is that the days are getting longer. And news sources can please stop repeating the events of 2025.

There’s kind of a blessing and curse with the holiday break. It can be a fun, relaxing time with family and friends. The mood is just a bit brighter, even if you have to work. No one expects much efficiency unless maybe you’re working on a year-end deadline that couldn’t be finished earlier.

The curse is that it gets really comfortable sleeping in on these long nights, then lounging most of each day except for shoveling snow, which doesn’t end until May. New Year’s Day is when you start thinking about getting back into the swing of things.

But it’s always the first day back at work that seems the worst. Refocusing on details required from your job takes time and effort, long enough to dream about retiring. But then you remember that the holiday bills need to be paid.

Calendars Everywhere

Does anything really change when the years do? Hanging up a new calendar only changes the calendar, nothing else. The weather doesn’t change. It isn’t suddenly spring. In fact, winter has just started. Schools follow their own calendars. Religions have their own calendars. And, of course, there are the fiscal calendars that businesses use.

But no matter what we do or believe, we all need a calendar we can agree on so we at least know what day it is. And it has to start somewhere. So why not January 1?

Our calendar is the Gregorian calendar. Every country that wants to do business with each other uses it. The calendar was decreed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 to fix problems with the Julian calendar calculating when Easter would be each year. It also removed 10 days to catch up, caused by calculating the year to be 365.25 days long when it should have been 365.2422. Both calendars started each year on January 1.

Britain was using the Julian calendar at the time but started its new year on March 25. Apparently, the actual date that a year began was not as big a deal as Christmas. They had broken with the Catholic Church and started the Anglican Church. They did not trust Catholics so they and their colonies refused to use the new calendar until 1782. By then they had to skip ahead 11 days to catch up. This included the U.S. so in its early years, our country’s new year started on March 25. Fun facts.

Our Endearing Endurance of January

So it’s January in Minnesota. Most of the country has an opinion about that. But it seems to help keep the riffraff out. For us that live here, January is the month of endurance. It’s a time when we show the world our instinct to survive because we could die if we aren’t prepared.

But we’re geared for this. In January we don’t buy groceries; we buy provisions. This year the weather is already testing us. Remember the Vikings playoff games in December and January when they played outdoors at Met Stadium? Home field advantage gave us a good, warm feeling.

Many like to skate and ski in winter in a Minnesota winter. Some even enjoy shoveling snow. But most of us who can’t travel to Arizona for the winter like staying inside. It gives us time to plan the rest of the year because, you know, we’re always getting ready for something.

A physical calendar includes spaces to fill up with scribbles you can’t read. A calendar app on your smartphone likely has already carried over all the repeating events you had in 2025. The birthdays, anniversaries and family events are already in place, even the doctor appointment that was months away and is suddenly here in a week. There’s no escaping these commitments. It’s just that they seem far distant during December because they’re not on this calendar.

We can love or hate calendars. There are those who cross off each day on a physical calendar, as if to say, “Whew, got through another one.” And there are some whose calendar is still from last year.

We’ll be fine as long as we all stay on the same page.