New Year's Polar Plunge

        The January Christmas & The New Year polar “Plunge”

                                        

Although for most people Christmas is Dec. 25^th, we hear of another celebration on Jan. the 6^th. It sounds like there are 2 Christmases! Actually, there was a change in the world calendar that was eventually accepted by all countries, or almost everyone.

The old calendar was known as the Julian and was adopted in the days of Julius Caesar. However, the experts decided that the duration of the year, a complete revolution around the sun, is shorter than the 365 days and 6 hours as is in the Julian calendar; in fact the so called tropical year, average time between two spring equinoxes, is 365 days and 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds long. That difference would make us lose half a second in a century or 2 days in 400 years.

This discrepancy was described by the Byzantine historian Nikiforos Gregoras (1259-1359) who proposed the first change. It was later adopted by the Pope Gregory the 13^th who ordered the change in the calendar in 1582. The new calendar was called  Gregorian after Gregoras or Pope Gregory, or both. The committee that was set up to calculate the change decided that Thursday Oct. the 4^th, 1582 was followed by Friday Oct. the 15^th. On top of that a series of leap years with 366 years were devised. Only years whose last two digits can be divided exactly by 4 are the leap years.

France was the first country to adopt the new calendar. Other countries copied the change but only much later. Some of the last countries were China in 1912, Russia after the revolution in 1917 and Greece in 1923.

Some people in the Eastern Christian churches are skeptical of decisions taken by the Western Christian churches because of the schism (break apart) between the two major bodies of Christianity. Therefore, most Russian and some Ukranian and Greek people adhere to the old calendar for reasons of trust. According to those, Christmas is Jan. the 6^th and the New Year is Jan. the 14^th.

Another custom that comes with the New Year is the plunge into the usually frozen waters of the ocean that some brave people undertake. Why should people jump into the frozen waters to celebrate the New Year ? Well, this custom may be linked to the Epiphany (Theophany) celebration of Jan. the 6^th (in the Gregorian calendar). This is the day Jesus was baptized in the Jordan river by St. John the Baptist. During these celebrations in the Eastern churches (Greek) the priest throws a cross into the nearby body of water and lots of people jump in to recover it. The finder will be rewarded, therefore the competition is strong, notwithstanding the temperature of the water.