New Year around the world

Happy New 2015! May you all find new challenges and enjoy the ride.

The Western Festive Season is so popular around the world that many people tend to see it as the day when the world clock ticks one year ahead. However, to many people around the world it is not any more special than the days before or after it. This is because they use different calendars and did not even enter the Second Millennium a bit more than dozen years ago.

In various parts of India the New Year is celebrated on April 14th. The mystical Maya and Aztec calendars denoted the start of the year on February 23rd.

Other cultures like the Hebrew and the Chinese traditionally follow Lunar calendars, which leads to a Lunar New Year which does not have a fixed date according to the Western Gregorian calendar. The Chinese New Year regularly occurs in late January or February, and the Hebrew is typically some time in September or early October.

The Gregorian date of the New Year according to the Muslim calendar is even more difficult to determine. The reason is that this calendar is based entirely on lunar cycles. This led to a very strange flow of events when in the Gregorian 2008 there were two Muslim new year celebrations: both on 11 January and 28 December.

All in all, the next New Year celebration might be much sooner than you think. Why not start making plans to celebrate once again in a couple of months? You might benefit from learning a bit of the local language on the way.