New year

New Year is the time at which a new calendar year begins and the calendar's year count increments by one.

Many cultures celebrate the event in some manner and the 1st day of January is often marked as a national holiday.

In the Gregorian calendar, the most widely used calendar system today, New Year occurs on 1 January (New Year's Day). This was also the case both in the old Roman calendar (at least after about 713 BCE) and in the Julian calendar that succeeded it.

Other calendars have been used historically in different parts of the world; some calendars count years numerically, while others do not.

During the Middle Ages in western Europe, while the Julian calendar was still in use, authorities moved New Year's Day variously, depending upon locale, to one of several other days, among them: 1 March, 25 March, Easter, 1 September, and 25 December. Beginning in 1582, the adoptions of the Gregorian calendar and changes to the Old Style and New Style dates meant the various local dates for New Year's Day changed to using one fixed date, January 1.

The widespread official adoption of the Gregorian calendar and marking January 1 as the beginning of a new year is almost global now. Regional or local use of other calendars continue, along with the cultural and religious practices that accompany them. In Latin America, various native cultures continue the observation of traditions according to their own calendars. Israel, China, India and other countries, continue to celebrate New Year on different dates.

The most common dates of modern New Year's celebrations are listed below, ordered and grouped by their alignment relative to the Gregorian calendar.

The new year of many South and Southeast Asian calendars falls between 13 and 15 April, marking the beginning of spring.

The early development of the Christian liturgical year coincided with the Roman Empire (east and west), and later the Byzantine Empire, both of which employed a taxation system labeled the Indiction, the years for which began on September 1. This timing may account for the ancient church's establishment of September 1 as the beginning of the liturgical year, despite the official Roman New Year's Day of January 1 in the Julian calendar, because the indiction was the principal means for counting years in the empires, apart from the reigns of the Emperors. The September 1 date prevailed throughout all of Christendom for many centuries, until subsequent divisions eventually produced revisions in some places.

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