When January 1st Wasn’t the First Day of the Year
How a struggle between England and the Pope delayed the shift away from Annunciation Day
In a couple of weeks, it will be the first day of 2021. Time to hang your freshly bought calendars and write a new year on your checks.
But strange as it may seem, January 1st did not always signal the beginning of a new calendar year. Up to 1752, the two were separate things in England and its colonies. Until that point, people began each calendar year on March 25, which was Annunciation Day — or Lady Day. This was the day the Angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary to deliver the news that she had conceived and would give birth to Jesus in nine months.
It took an 18th-century act of Parliament for England to officially begin each new calendar year on January 1st. The centuries of discrepancy cause lots of headaches for historians and genealogists. There’s no question that it’s strange, not least because England lagged behind much of the rest of Western Europe. Why did this Protestant nation cling to Annunciation Day — by its very definition a day revolving around the Virgin — as the time to change the calendar when most Catholic countries had already shifted to January 1st in the 16th century or 17th century?
