There's an old story, the truth of which is uncertain, about a Baltimore newspaper that once ran this headline over its annual yuletide story: "Christmas Celebrated Around the World."
A better example of rustic thinking couldn't be imagined than this, by a headline writer apparently impervious to the fact that Christmas is just not for everybody.
But that happened a long time ago. The world today is more sophisticated, more diverse. Or at least one would presume that such diversity as remains in it is more widely appreciated.
So what is all this about The Millennium? Where is the origin of all these plans to celebrate its arrival everywhere from Kiribati -- a speck of a state that sits in the middle of the Pacific Ocean -- to the Great Wall of China, to the dusty acre of sand before the Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt?
All three are venues for big fireworks and cork-popping millennium bashes come Jan. 1, 2000, which is puzzling. Not only is that date wrong -- the first day of the third millennium is Jan. 1, 2001 -- but the millennium under discussion is a Christian construct and only one of those three is a majority-Christian country: Kiribati. Fifty-three percent of its 80,919 people are Roman Catholics and 41 percent are Protestants, but Muslims ** and Buddhists predominate in Egypt and China.
Religion is important when it comes to calendars and millennia and such. The Christian calendar begins with the birth of Christ. Most people know that, even non-Christians.
The Islamic calendar starts its count the day the prophet Mohammed packed up and left Mecca for Medina. This leave-taking is called the hijra and it corresponds to A.D. Sept. 20, 622, on the Christian calendar, known formally as the Gregorian Calendar, after Pope Gregory XIII. According to the Islamic calendar this is the year 1,419.
All countries whose people are Muslims -- Shiite or Sunni -- accept this calendar, but one. Libya begins its calendar on the date of Mohammed's death, 10 years later. This was an innovation introduced by Col. Muammar el Kadafiin the 1980s.
"He thought the death of the last prophet was more important than his migration," said Professor Marius Deeb of the Johns Hopkins' Middle East studies center.
Deeb says most Muslims conduct their lives by the Christian calendar, except when it comes to Islamic holy days, such as Ramadan.
Islamic states given to fundamentalist interpretations of the Koran, like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran, usually try to abide by the Islamic calendar internally, says Deeb. "But when they have to deal with the world they have to go by the Christian calendar."
Which is to say, business calls the tune. Certainly it does for most Jews living in Western countries like this one.
5759 and counting
The Jewish calendar is one of the most ancient among the world's major civilizations, though some believe Hindu calendars may predate it. At sundown on Sept. 20, observant Jews celebrated the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashana, and welcomed in 5759.
The Jewish calendar began with what may be the ultimate
religious event: creation of the universe. This, according to rabbinical lore, is when it all started, under the hand of God.
Nothing endorsing the Jewish count of 5,759 years can be found in the Torah -- the five books of Moses -- according to Rabbi Paul Caplan of Baltimore's Beth Am synagogue on Eutaw Place. But some justification is written in the Talmud, and there is a reference in Leviticus to a new year and "the blowing of a horn."
Which is what people do on New Year's Eve -- even in China, where, believe it or not, a New Year's party on the Great Wall will not be so foreign a thing as might seem. China has been operating on the Gregorian calendar since 1912, following the revolution that ended the great string of imperial dynasties and introduced a republic under Sun Yat-sen.
Before that it conducted business according to its traditional calendar, according to which we are in the year 4696.
Like the Jewish one, the Chinese calendar has a non-historical beginning: The Chinese count was begun during the dynasty of an emperor named Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor as he was known. No one has ever proved he existed.
"The earliest date we can actually record is right after the Zhou Dynasty, during the period of the Warring States," says Willow Chang, an expert on Chinese culture at the China Institute in New York. "That date accords with 841 B.C. on the Christian calendar."
Because the traditional Chinese calendar is a lunar calendar, New Year's Day is a movable feast. (Calendars usually come in two varieties: solar and lunar. The first relates to the time it takes for the Earth to orbit the sun, the second the time it takes for the moon to travel around the Earth.)
The Chinese New Year "usually comes between late January and mid-February," says The Willow, as she calls herself. "Every year has 354 or 355 days, and every year we are 10 days short of the [Christian] solar calendar, so every three years the Chinese add one more month to bring this into line."
If they didn't, the months would slip around the circle of the year and go out of sync with the seasons, so that before too long China, which is a Northern Hemisphere country, would have winter in July, which might be disorienting.
The Mayan cycle
The Maya of the Yucatan have two calendars, a ritualistic one of 260 days that operates in conjunction with the longer solar, and secular, calendar of 365 days.
"The interesting thing is that they intermesh like gears," says Mayanist Eugenia Robinson of George Washington University. Each 52 years they return to the same coincidence of dates.
It, too, is an ancient calendar.
"You might say the calendar begins in 3014 B.C.," Robinson said. The cycle that began back then is to end in the year 2012. This year is probably the year 5012 or 5013.
India is blessed (or cursed) with more than one calendar, too, said Sumitra Singh, the helpful librarian at the embassy in Washington. Some are regional, from places like Kashmir and Bihar, and are not accepted all over the subcontinent.
Before independence in 1948, when India was in the hands of the English, it ran on the Gregorian calendar because the English were Christians and had their way. After independence, the Saka calendar, now called the national calendar, was re-imposed. It is a solar calendar like the Gregorian calendar, except it starts the year in March.
Some believe this a more appropriate time to begin the year. Many ancient people preferred this month, for it is when the earth begins to return to life. There is no good reason to begin in the month we do.
"On the first of January nothing happens except to the calendar," wrote the naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch, in his 1949 book "The Twelve Seasons." "The date marks no astronomical event and corresponds to no change in the seasons, either here or anywhere else."
Newspapers from Egypt to India to Bangladesh (which honors the Bengali calendar, established in 1405 by the Nawob of Bengal) and even Sri Lanka (whose Buddhists adhere to a calendar that started with the birth of the Buddha more than 2,500 years ago) list the Christian dates on their fronts.
Also, train and air schedules throughout this vast area are set according to the Gregorian calendar.
All this, in case anyone missed it, makes a point. It is that most countries of the world, including non-Christian ones, operate at least in part according to the Christian calendar. Japan signed up in 1873, Turkey in 1925.
That means that a hypothetical newspaper headline that read, "Millennium Observed Around the World," would be quite inoffensive today, even accurate. If we could find the copy editor of that old howler about Christmas, maybe we could drag him out of retirement and allow him to redeem himself.
Pub Date: 11/10/98