For much of human history, celebrating birthdays was more than egotistical; to many, it was a sin of pride.

To the ancients, only the Gods or their physical manifestations on earth — Pharaoh (as noted in Genesis 40:20), or, much later, the Emperors of civilizations as diverse as Rome and Japan — were important enough to have the date of their birth honored.

Still, some four-hundred years before the birth of Christ, the people of modern-day Iran and Iraq apparently decided the average man’s birthday was worth noting. The practice of astrology — begun in a primitive form as early as the third millennium  — became more sophisticated under the Babylonians by the second millennium. And with astrology came a better method of recording exact dates of birth — even for mere mortals (though usually those of royal birth who could afford the services of an astrologer).

Horoscopes elevated the importance of birthdays (the earliest of which can be traced to April 29, 410 B.C. near what is now Baghdad). Herodotus, in his On the Customs of Persians (430 B.C.), observed that “Of all the days in the year, the one which [Persians] celebrate most is their birthday.”

Birthday celebrations were slow, however, to catch on among Jews (as evident in the writings of Josephus in the first century A.D.), and later,  Christians.

Writing in 245 A.D., Origen of Alexandria in a homily on Leviticus (viii in Migne, P.G., XII, 495) commented that “none of the saints can be found who ever held a feast or a banquet upon his birthday, or rejoiced on the day when his son or daughter was born. But sinners rejoice and make merry on such days.”

Party pooper.

Oddly enough, it’s likely that the celebration of Christ’s birth was what opened the doors to the common man recognizing his own birthday and those of his family without guilt. Though the date of December 25 took many years and much debate upon which to be settled, it is in the years following celebrations of the birth of Christ that we begin to see Church records noting the births, baptisms and/or the naming of common folk.

Name Day, a practice popular in the Middle Ages in Catholic and Orthodox countries, tied a individual (no matter how lowly) to a Saint for whom they were named; thus honoring a Saint’s Day became an acceptable way to celebrate one’s own name (and thus commemorate one’s very existence and, by extension, birth). No sin of pride, participating in the festivities of a Saint’s Day because of your given name was encouraged. In lives otherwise grim during the Middle Ages, Name Day was a rare opportunity for personal annual jollity.

But Saint’s Days (and thus Name Days) fell out of favor with the Protestant Reformation and dawn of the Renaissance. The former rejected practices deemed idolatrous and the latter led ultimately to an Age of Reason. But by the eighteenth century, notions of happiness and liberty finally made it acceptable to champion and thus celebrate the individual. And the best time to celebrate the individual? Their birthday.

“The highest of all holidays in the satanic tradition is the date of one’s own birth.” – Anton LaVey, The Satanic Bible

Poets begin elevating the birthday to heights of adoration by the early eighteenth century. Whether in pursuit of a woman — like Jonathan Swift in 1719 to his dearest Stella — or the recognition of a great man — as in Robert Burns’ 1794 Ode for General Washington’s Birthday — the celebration of birth was nascent in art and becoming widespread in culture. There was Kinderfeste in early nineteenth-century Germany. Birthday cards — though more of a formal greeting than an acknowledgement of one’s age — were known to be sent in Victorian England. Birthday cakes, likewise wished “Many Happy Returns on the Day.” And a little known ditty from 1893 called “Good Morning to All” morphed at some point into the ubiquitous “Happy Birthday to You” by 1912. By the 1920s, the birthday party had arrived; age-specific parties like the  “Sweet Sixteen,” a custom for girls in a burgeoning middle class, came into vogue.

Thus we arrive at the modern-day birthday party. From the understandably jubilant “Baby’s First” to the “wow, you’re still alive” centenarian’s final few, the birthday has transcended the individual and become an almost communal necessity — an industry unto itself. An office-interuptus excuse for cake. A click upon a Facebook wall.

In a matter of a few millennium, we have gone from believing few of us worthy to note their birth to an expectation that there is not only reason for a party, but an obligation to our family and friends to do so.

Still, for many, celebrating a birthday is a reminder of getting older.

“I grabbed a pile of dust, and holding it up, foolishly asked for as many birthdays as the grains of dust, I forgot to ask that they be years of youth.” — Ovid, Metamorphoses

With the passage of time, many of us now have “birthday blues.” In a culture that worships youth, many do not want to be reminded of the calendar. “Be happy,” says the world. And if you’re not? Something must be wrong with you. Science has shown that “birthdays are periods of increased risk for men aged 35 and older in the general population and in those receiving mental health care.” Perhaps we are all not meant to have happy birthdays.

Notions of aging are forced upon us. We are, no pun intended, born into them. There’s the innocence of childhood. The reckless days of youth. Conquering the world in our twenties. Settling down in our thirties. Looking back in our forties. New horizons in our fifties. Retirement, if we’re fortunate, in our sixties. The “golden years” of our seventies, eighties and, for a lucky few, nineties.

All are decades marked by expectation.

Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige, the oldest rookie to play in Major League Baseball at the age of 42, is quoted as saying two of the most profound statements about birthdays and aging that no psychologist, poet or philosopher could ever come close to expressing. There is his famous, oft-misquoted and widely adapted to suit many an occasion: “Age is a case of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.” Even more insightful is his seeming challenge to all of us:

“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?” — Satchel Paige

Age. Accomplishment. Entitlement. The “I” above all else. Self-doubt by way of selfism.

Birthdays and our expectations of them can often take us to dark places: arrogance, bitterness, pride. But the best of all celebrations are those that affirm life.

To be alive is precious at any age. And to commemorate birth? Pride, but not hubris. An honor that matters.

Time is elastic. 

When I wrote of the fluidity of time, I should instead have recognized its elasticity.

It’s a relatively simple equation: a year divided by the sum of total years lived will provide a percentage of perception. To a sixty-five-year-old man, a year is 1 and 1/2% of a life lived. For him, a mere twelve months fly by. But to that man’s five-year-old grandson, that same year is 20% of the child’s entire life. For that boy, summer seems an eternity away.

At the beginning of a new year, time seems so pressing. There’s an increased weight to the present. Yet none of us are prescient, and all of us wait. If only time could be sped up. Run backward. Paused. Played back again. Is that memory?

We can remember, but can we will ourselves forward — beyond the next moment? Like the tension on a rubber band, can we stretch our minds and snap across time?

MENTAL TIME TRAVEL

Chronesthesia. Episodic memory. Mental time travel. First suggested by Endel Tulving in the 1980s, mental time travel refers to the ability to be aware in the present of both one’s past and one’s future.

A process that involves episodic thinking, travel to the past involves the memory of autobiographical events. I recall celebrating New Year’s Eve in Times Square this year. I had a lot to drink.

Travel to the future is the recall and integration of relevant information from memory coupled with the projection and processing of self-reference in subjective time. I will celebrate New Year’s Eve in Times Square again this year. But I won’t drink as much.

For Tulving, awareness of past and future comes down to the perception of self in subjective time. We presume we were present in Times Square on New Year’s Eve because we can remember the time, the place, the sum of our sensory data and even our emotions from a given moment. We then assume we can be present at a future point in history because we can use relevant episodic memory to conceive of a time, place, emotions and sensory information familiar to us and associated with that time.

We think in cycles. And while much of the pattern is due to our conditioning from the calendar, some of it is simply hard-wired into our DNA. We look back not in a line but in a circle. We can project forward because we know the wheel will come around again.

Which takes us back to January. And the timing of this post.

While looking forward to the future has been a part of the human condition pretty much since there was a human condition, celebrating the new year in January is a relatively new phenomenon (and writing about it near the end of the month? sheer procrastination).

MARCH MADNESS

Rituals give meaning to the passage of time. From the primitive cogitations of earliest man to the shallow observations of Ryan Seacrest — the passage of time necessitates ritual meaning. But the date for celebration has been in debate for millennia.

Four thousand years ago, the Babylonians celebrated their new year in late March, around the time of the vernal equinox. Others among the ancients — including the Egyptians, Persians and Phoenicians — instead began their year with the fall equinox. And the Greeks — whose God Janus (a deity of doorways and passages, endings and beginnings) looks forward and back to both new year and old — marked their new year with the winter solstice.

January did not even exist until around 700 B.C.E., when Numa Pontilius, the successor to Romulus and second king of Rome, added it. The first time the new year was celebrated on January 1st was in Rome in 153 B.C.E. when the new year was moved from March to January to honor newly elected officials of the Roman Republic. Still, as with most pagan customs,  the celebration of new year in March continued for quite some time.

January 1st was officially Instituted as the beginning of the New Year in 46 B.CE. when Julius Caesar adopted a solar-based calendar (hence the name Julian Calendar). The practice would last for six hundred years until the Council of Tours where the celebration of January 1st was deemed pagan and the new year moved to December 25th, the birth of Christ. Celebrations at the vernal equinox were absorbed into Annunciation Day (the day Mary was told by the angel Gabriel that she would bear a child [i.e., conceived and therefore nine months before his birth]).

Still, many countries stuck to March as the start of the new year. The Church responded by celebrating January 1st as the day of Christ’s circumcision (now better known as the Solemnity of Mary),  thereby still raising the significance of the first of the day of the Julian calendar to some higher purpose that could hope to compete with an equinox. In 1582, the Gregorian Calendar (named for Pope Gregory XIII) was instituted as a replacement for the Julian calendar; it made some mathematical corrections to, among other things, align Easter celebrations with the vernal Equinox. The equinox thus retained as holiday, January 1 could be reclaimed as the beginning of the year.

Most western European countries soon changed the start of the year to January 1 (including Scotland in 1600). But England, Ireland and the British colonies (including the colonial Americans)  took their grand old time to officially  adopt the Gregorian calendar’s start of the year on January 1 (following the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 [curiously enacted in 1752]) .

A few hundred years later and the issue is finally settled.

ALL LIES IN PERCEPTION

The history of how humanity has measured the new year has little to no bearing on how each of us marks time.  It is the individual that perceives time’s passage that determines the beginning or end of the year.

You may think of it as the beginning of the new year. To someone else, it’s Wednesday.

Not surprisingly, our methods are not tied to calendars. Instead — as neuroscience and psychology would have us believe — time and our perception of it, is tied to memory and expectation.

The year begins in January because that’s how we personally remember it. We are aware of our past and our future because we can conceive that one happened and the other will happen.

We have memories of the year to come.