On the Edge

Jan 5

Happy New Year to all our readers, from Terroir North and South!

Our Christmas blog (no. 97 on Christmas landscapes) gave thanks to our forebears for creating a mid-winter festival which broke the monotony of cold and darkness and created hope by welcoming the return of the sun. But why, for much of the world, does the first day of the New Year follow so closely on Christmas celebrations?

For the western world it seems that we can blame the pre-Christian Romans when they overhauled their ten month calendar to be more in tune with the 12 lunar cycles in the solar year. January and February were added and the former, of course, was named after Janus (right), the god of doorways and beginnings. It must have seemed apt, therefore, to move the start of their new calendar year from the vernal equinox in March, to the beginning of January, a portal which was under Janus’ bi-directional supervision.

Less than a thousand years later, the Romans converted to Christianity and December 25th became a significant religious festival. Some Christian countries reverted back to a March New Year, which seems eminently sensible, but many continued with the big winter combo.

As a child, Terroir remembers a clear separation between the excitement of Christmas and the start of the new year. This slack period was a time when fathers went back to work and mothers did their best to entertain offspring before school re-started in early January. Banished to bed long before midnight, the line between the years was something we crossed in our sleep. We went to bed in one year and woke up in another; that was about as exciting as it got. New Year’s Day in England and Wales wasn’t even promoted to bank holiday status until 1974. But today, many Brits consider Christmas-and-New-Year as one extended mid-winter break.

As we manoeuvred ourselves through that colourful, expensive, highly-decorated, time-consuming, alcohol-fuelled, exciting, exhausting and anticipatory period which is known as ‘the-run-up-to-Christmas’ (aka Advent), Terroir started thinking about the very different festival geography of New Year’s Eve. This has a much shorter lead time and is over in the pop of a prosecco bottle as we all cross the temporal line from one year to the next in a geographical sequence westwards from the Pacific Ocean.

Time takes us to the edge of one year and pushes us over to the edge of the next. But, while the seasons march on, the world is full of other lines, edges and boundaries.

Here are some of the edges we spotted over the last 12 months.