Two thousand and twenty-four years after the birth of Christ, January 1 is much more than a pagan holiday, underlines the essayist Jean Duchesne: between the circumcision of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the Holy Family and the prayer for peace, there is reason to hope – and rejoice!
One might believe that the celebration which comes a week after Christmas is free of religious and therefore divisive references. It is unanimously celebrated: we celebrate on the evening of December 31 before kissing at midnight and exchanging wishes for the year that begins. No one will argue that it is indecent that the next day, January 1 , is a public holiday and that beliefs are thereby imposed that some might consider superstitious or blasphemous to sacrosanct secularism. And yet…
Natural religiosity
Anthropologists have noted that, in all civilizations, we celebrate the beginning of the calendar cycle which punctuates and marks time, in phase with the succession of seasons. It is essential to register collectively in the “march” of the world and measure both its movement and permanence, by instinctively or intuitively becoming aware of uncontrollable data and hoping for favorable circumstances in the stage which follows. opens. The festivities allow it to be inaugurated pleasantly, even if nothing is assured.
This spontaneous religiosity, or one which does not dare to recognize itself as such because it remains formal and does not require an explicit and confessed “faith”, is assumed, specified, substantiated in most of the “great” religions, and without complex by Christianity. To the extent that there is a need inherent to humanity and that it concerns traditions, the faith based on history, and which even contributes to “making” it, infallibly conditions one to absorb customs without difficulty. and rites which, in repetitive duration without obvious origin or destination, serve to mark stable and recurring landmarks.
The year 2024 of the Christian era
In this case, the new year, both new and identical to the previous one, is distinguished by a number: 2024. We can say that it is a pure convention, but it is not arbitrary: it is the two thousand and twenty-fourth year of the Christian era, that is to say after the birth of Christ , Son of God born of the Virgin Mary , who thus remains, whether we like it or not, a universal reference – or at least the most common, even if we refuse to recognize it by name and if there are other ways of counting and determining a year zero.
It does not matter after that that the exact date of the Nativity is not scientifically determinable, that our so-called Gregorian calendar was only developed under Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, and that the change of vintage was also not fixed on January 1st than in the 16th century : first in the Catholic countries of Europe, then gradually in the Protestant nations which rallied to Rome at least on this level. Japan, China, Turkey took action in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the rest of the world after the Second World War. It still doesn’t matter that most of the Eastern Churches have kept the so-called Julian calendar (attributed to Julius Caesar): whatever the difference (now 13 days), the anchoring point remains the event of Bethlehem.
The evolution of Christmas
The one week difference remains to be interpreted. We can see in it a concern as innate as it is theologically founded to distinguish, without separating them, the spiritual from the temporal, or the sacred from the profane, or even the time integrated into the plan of the Eternal from the time regulated by the course of stars and measured by clocks. That the modes of celebration have changed and continue to change simply means that History is not finished and that we are still searching, even waiting or lacking (in the absence of hope).
Even Christmas has evolved. It is no longer at all obvious that the Church set it for December 25 to recover and baptize pagan celebrations. It seems rather that, conversely, the solemnity of the Unconquered Sun was instituted only in 274, to counter Christianity which on that day was already celebrating the Nativity of the Messiah, without link with the idolatrous Saturnalia and elsewhere afterwards. Customs then developed. In 1223 (that’s just 800 years ago!) there was the nativity scene of Saint Francis of Assisi, then in the 19th century a sentimental focus on childhood, family and gifts, thanks to the invention in 1823 ( exactly 200 years ago) of Santa Claus by the Episcopalian (American Anglican) theologian Clement Clarke Moore and the Christmas Carol of the Englishman Charles Dickens exactly twenty years later.
From one New Year’s Eve to another
January 1 , in the Roman Church, has long been dedicated to the commemoration of the circumcision of Jesus , a week after his birth according to the Gospel of Saint Luke ( 2, 21 ). But this reminder of the “Jewishness” of Jesus hardly caught on in times of contempt for Israel. It was easily supplanted towards the end of the 19th century by a late evening dinner on December 31, until the vintage changed at midnight. It was like a resumption or duplication of the already festive snack after the first of the three masses (night, dawn and day) said for Christmas according to a tradition dating back to the 7th century , of which we find an echo in Alphonse Daudet’s tale, Les Trois Messes basses (1875).
December 31 is, in the Gregorian calendar, the feast of Saint Sylvester , thirty-third pope (from 314 to 335). His pontificate coincides with major events: the legalization of Christianity and the Council of Nicaea. But the Bishop of Rome seems then to have been only a passive witness and his simply honorable reputation was not enough to justify sumptuous liturgies followed by feasts. Therefore, when increased prosperity allowed New Year’s Eve festivities to spread, the Church sought to motivate them spiritually. In 1893, the feast of the Holy Family was established on the Sunday after Christmas – which, in this year 2023, falls on December 31.
With the Mother of God, for peace
In 1931, Pope Pius XI established January 1 as the solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. It was to mark the fifteenth centenary of the Council of Ephesus (431), which proclaimed that in the Virgin had taken flesh not only the man Jesus, but also and indissolubly the eternal Son, fully God. It is an invitation to better measure, eight days later (in the “octave”, as they say), what Christmas means and which is so little manifest in appearances: God reveals his glory by not fearing to lower until born of a woman. Here we begin to glimpse the liberating “logic” which articulates the contradictory and equally scandalous events of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. In 1968, Saint Paul VI made January 1 an annual World Day for Peace . At the time, it was the Cold War, the threat of a nuclear conflict, the American impasse in Vietnam… Today, there is Ukraine, Gaza, Nagorno-Karabakh, Yemen, a number of African countries… There is therefore no shortage of reasons for starting the year by turning to God, both alone and collectively in church, and they are entirely reconcilable: getting closer to the Jewish Jesus, recognizing Mary as our Mother as well as his own and sharing their life like Joseph , all this can only help to perceive how to face temptations and conflicts, and how to welcome their grace… And then it is a hope which can entirely celebrate!
