Christmas Day , December 25 or January 7?
Merry Christmas to all my readers and followers and I wish you all a Happy New Year.
Most people who celebrate Christmas Day do so on December 25, for religious or cultural reasons or both. However, followers of the Orthodox Church usually celebrate Christmas Day on January 7, thirteen days later. The reasons for this difference are interesting and, as I will discuss further in this post, is that they also differ with the astronomical measurements and the various differences between the two. Branches of the Christian Church.
Solar year
The most basic unit of time is a year. A solar year is a term used by astronomers to describe how long it takes for the sun to return to its exact position in a cycle of seasons. It has been accurately measured at approximately 7.7 places, 365.2421897 days.
In a solar year, the cycle of seasons is the amount of time from a particular point in time to the exact point of the next year (such as the equivalent of one summer series to the next or spring equals one another).
Since the solar year is slightly longer than 5 36 slightly days, if we use a calendar where each year always had exactly 365 days, the calendar year would run slowly at a rate slightly less than a quarter of the solar year. Every year, in about 400 years, the calendar would be about 9799 days away from the seasons. Therefore, in the Northern Hemisphere, spring will begin at the end of June, summer solstice (with the brightest day of the year) at the end of September, and fall (or autumn) will be equal. We add an extra day (February 29) every four years to prevent this happening in late December. When that happens, it's a leap year.
The jumping of the Julian calendar every four years is named after Julius Caesar, who introduced it in 45 BC, and used it by all Christian nations until 1582. However, if we have a leap year every year for four years, the result will be a year that averages 365.25 days longer, which is 0.078 days longer than the actual length of the solar year. Due to this slight correction, the Julian calendar is slowly receding from the natural calendar.
Between 325, when the Julian calendar was first used by the church to explain the date of Easter, and 1582, it went back 10 days. Thus the equinox of spring in the same year, the first day of spring, when day and night were about 12 hours long, was March 11 (while in 325 it was March 21), the day with the most light. It was June. 11 and the shortest day was December 11. The spring balance is used to calculate Easter (see note 1) so that the date on which Easter could fall is set back 10 days.
Gregorian calendar
In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII introduced a purification to prevent the calendar used by the Church from deviating from the natural calendar. The change he made was that a century (for example, 1600, 1700, 1900, 2000, 2100) could only be a leap year if it were divided by 400. So 1700, 1800, 1900 will not be leap years, but 1600 and 2000 will be. He also suggested that the calendar be brought back to suit the seasons so that spring domination would return on March 21. For this it was necessary to delete 10 days when moving from the old to the new calendar. Pope Gregory's calendar, which is used in almost every country today, is called the Gregorian calendar. The average is 365.2425 days per year, which is very close to the length of the solar year.
Catholic countries in Europe rapidly adopted the Gregorian calendar. Spain, then Portugal and most of Italy, adopted it on October 4, 1582. In Spain, the day after October 4, 1582, was October 15, 1582, the day from October 5 to October 14 was simply missed.
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Initially, Protestant and Orthodox countries in Europe refused to adopt the Gregorian calendar, realizing that the Catholic Church's imposition of power on non-Catholic countries was a conspiracy. This caused confusion in the dates when some countries changed the Gregorian calendar and other countries still used the Julian calendar. Conventions such as 10/20 February 1667 were used to indicate that an event occurred on February 10, 1667 in the Julian calendar, with the same day on February 20, 1667 in the Gregorian calendar.
The whole of Europe adopts the Gregorian calendar
Eventually, all Protestant countries changed to the Gregorian calendar. In particular, Britain and its colonies, which at that time included the United States, adopted the Gregorian calendar on Wednesday, September 2, 1752, followed by Thursday, September 14, 1752.
Calendar in other countries of the world
Almost all countries of the world use the Gregorian calendar for administrative purposes, sometimes with some more traditional calendars. For example, China uses the Gregorian calendar for most national holidays, such as public or business affairs, but uses the traditional Chinese calendar, which has names instead of numbers in addition to years. The Chinese calendar can have 353, 354, 355, 383, 384, or 385 days in a year, and the first day of the new year is at the end of January or February. The current year runs from February 8, 2016 to January 27, 2017 and it is the year of the monkey. January 28, 2017 will be the beginning of the Chinese New Year Chicken Year.
What happens next?
The Julian calendar is slowly moving from the natural calendar to 7.8 days per thousand years, so if the Orthodox Church does not adopt the Gregorian calendar, then the date of the Orthodox Christmas will be found later. For 2,000 years Orthodox Christians will celebrate Christmas on January 23 (in the Gregorian calendar) and for 10,000 years they will celebrate Christmas at the end of March.
As mentioned earlier, the average length of a year in the Gregorian calendar is 365.2425 days and the length of a solar year is 365.2421897. So even the Gregorian calendar is only a close estimate of the "real year" and makes a very modest correction. To align the Gregorian calendar with the natural calendar, one day must be left every 3,200 years.
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