Why do many of us wake up with an aching head and a set of resolutions to do better in life and give things up that are bad for us on January the first? Apart from it being a bank holiday, January really doesn’t have much going for it. It is the middle of winter and the weather is generally cold or mild, dull and wet. It also contains Blue Monday, this year the 21^st, when there is a considerable worry from mental health organisations for us all as this is the time when credit cards bills come in and most of the resolutions have gone by the wayside. Better then to concentrate on that jolly holiday at the start and forget that for this month it’s all downhill till the spring time. One way you can see the new year in in style is to have a family party and use a Gloucestershire mobile bar hire company like wearethemoversandshakers.com/mobile-bar-hire-gloucestershire to cater for all your drink needs.

The reason we have January the first as the start of the year is the fault of the Catholic Church and authorities who couldn’t decide which calendar to use. There are two options. The first and now most wildly used is the Gregorian calendar. This has the solar year being 364 days, or 365 if it’s a leap year and we get the 29^th as well. In the medieval era it was decided that major Christian societies should move their official start to the year away from the starts of spring to something closer to a religious holiday. This is where the Catholic Church comes in. They were keen for us all to have the start near Christmas day, the twenty fifth of December or keep it where it was near to Easter. As the date of Easter changes each year the Christmas Day date is anchored in so it was easier to go for that. All major western societies then adopted the Gregorian over the Julian. It helps that it was Gregorian Monks, in between a bit of chanting, that created it as opposed to that nasty old Pagan Julius Caesar who created the other Julian calendar. The fact that the monks made a bad error with the calculations, so much so that Jesus is down as being born in 4BC (BC meaning Before Christ so 4 years before himself!) is just good old human error.

The Julian calendar was created by Caesar to sort out the mess the Roman system was in after the Punic wars. It is thirteen days behind us so as I write this on the seventh of January to the Julian calendar it’s actually Christmas Day!