March is the First Month of the Year

It’s March 1, the first day of the new year!  Time for my annual haircut.

The social ideal for hairstyles is like grass lawns.  There is some ideal length, usually right after it is cut, which naturally degrades over time as it grows.  As a result, there is constant pressure to frequently reset the length.  I say pooh-pooh to that.  I don’t have a grass lawn, and I don’t have a static haircut.  Rather than fruitlessly maintain a static state, I prefer to keep a dynamic equilibrium, cutting my hair once and letting it naturally evolve.  As an added benefit, my hair is short and cool during the summer and grows back to its thermally insulating length in the winter.

“But, wait!” I hear you say.  “January is the first month of the year, not March.  Are you stupid?”  Dear reader, let me convince you otherwise.  A historian can tell you that March was the first month of the year in the ancient Roman calendar, but I will appeal to more practical reasons that are relevant today.

Take a look at the names of the months.  We see numeric prefixes like “sept-” on several months:

• Month 9 September sept- 7

• Month 10 October oct- 8

• Month 11 November nov- 9

• Month 12 December dec- 10

Why is it that the numeric prefixes are all off by 2?  They aren’t off when the first month of the year is March.  

Moreover, consider February and leap day.  Why does February have such an unusual number of days?  And why is leap day tacked on in the middle of the calendar?  Remainders are usually handled at the end.  We say 9/4 = 2 + 0.25, not 1 + 0.25 + 1.  This whole setup makes more sense when February is at the end of the calendar to handle the rounding error of dividing 365.25 days into 12 months.

Lastly, consider the seasons.  Winter is traditionally defined as December thru February, and Spring as March thru May.  Cutting the year at Dec/Jan awkwardly cuts the middle of winter.  Cutting along season lines like Feb/Mar would line up nicely.  Spring also makes more sense as the first season of the year, as it is the season of birth and growth and the start of the next cycle of life.

As a historian would tell you, the reason behind this January fuckery is the Romans.  Our calendar dates back to ancient Roman times, when the first month of the year was in fact March.  It was not until ~700 CE that the first month was changed (by an emperor’s decree) to be January.  (As an aside, July and August are named after Julius and Augustus Caesar, respectively, as a public relations stunt).

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While I’m nitpicking the idiosyncrasies of our calendar, let’s talk about months and weeks.  Months offer a compromise between dividing the year into 12, which has a useful number of divisors, and each month roughly corresponding to the lunar cycle of 29.5 days.  Weeks are used to subdivide the lunar cycle into the closest divisible approximation, 28 = 4 x 7.  

Nowadays, the lunar cycle is not really important as most humans are far removed from nature’s cycles, but the seven day week is deeply ingrained into our rhythms.  To remove the funkiness of months  with variable days, an alternative proposal is to divide the year into 13 months, each with exactly 28 days, known as the International Fixed Calendar.  This division isn’t perfect, leaving 1 day leftover (or 2 on leap years), but those could simply be viewed as universal holidays.