What is Special About the First of January?

 

            The first of January, also known as the New Year, is the largest celebrated holiday in the world. In almost every country, whether Japan, Australia or Brazil, the day is marked with festivities, firecrackers and feasts.

            Astronomically speaking, January 1^st is an odd time for the New Year. It signifies neither the spring nor the fall equinox, nor does it coincide with either of the two solstices. It lies in the middle of the earth’s journey between the Zodiac constellations of Capricorn and Aquarius and doesn’t match with the end or beginning of any of the seasons.

            In original cultures, spring marked the beginning of a New Year, logically enough, since the season marked rebirth—of plants and crops, after the barrenness of winter. It’s the season when, according to natural cycles, animals and birds mate. In China, the Spring Festival coincides with the New Year. According to the ancient Babylonian, Egyptian, Indian, Iranian and Mayan calendars, the year commences with the spring Vernal Equinox, usually in March or April, when the sun starts its northern journey.

            So how did January 1 become the beginning of the New Year? The first instance occurred in Rome, in 153 BC, under the rule of Julius Caesar. It marked the Roman civil year, when Roman consuls, the highest officials of the Roman republic, started their one-year tenures. After the fall of the Roman Empire, medieval Europe banned January 1^st as the New Year, considering it a pagan holiday, and replaced it with the 25^th of March, which roughly corresponds to the date of Jesus’s death and resurrection.

            The use of January 1 as the New Year can be traced to the Gregorian calendar, introduced by Pope Gregory XII in 1582 as a way to correct the Julian calendar. The imprecision in the Julian calendar, which added a full day every hundred-and-twenty-eight years, created difficulties for the Church in calculating Easter, celebrated on the Sunday after the ecclesiastical full moon on or after the twenty-first of March. European scholars had been well aware of the calendar drift since the early medieval period. After much debate, in 1622, the Catholic Church adopted January 1 as the beginning of the New Year.

Many people in the world follow two and, sometimes, more calendars, pertaining to their cultures and their religious holidays. Best wishes for the New Year, whenever you celebrate it!

Mohan Ashtakala (www.mohanauthor.com) is the author of  "The Yoga Zapper," a fantasy, and "Karma Nation," a literary romance. He is published by Books We Love (www.bookswelove.com)

The Past is a Different Place...by Sheila Claydon

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Readers are taken back to the 1800s in Remembering Rose, the first book in my Mapleby Memories trilogy. In the third book, due out in May and still untitled, readers are taken to the 13th century. Until today I didn't expect to travel further back but now I have learned a whole lot about life 50,000 years ago.

Why? Well because my 20 year old granddaughter, who is studying Biology at university, asked me to check a paper, shortly due to be submitted, for flow, and also to advise on losing approximately 400 words without significantly altering the research. 

As it is a scientific paper I had to read it through several times to fully understand it, especially the scientific terms, but once I done that I became really interested. I learned, for example, that animals and humans have domesticated each other. Initially wolves and humans lived in the same area but without interacting, but by the time humans began to develop into agricultural societies, about 10,000 years ago, they were working together. It is thought that a human preference for smaller, more docile and therefore easier to manage dogs, are what led to the breeds we see today.

One of the interesting changes is that wolves could solve tasks by observing the behaviour of others and they could also follow the human gaze to 'see' a problem, whereas domesticated (wolves) dogs cannot differentiate between the intentional and accidental actions of their handlers. Domestication has taught them to ignore cues not specifically addressed to them. Instead, living in close contact with humans has taught them to rely on help rather than trying to solve problems independently.

Cats, of course, are very different and it is thought that initially they probably took advantage of the the mice and food scraps they found around the first settlements. Later they learned to live with humans, becoming more docile and developing behaviour and reward conditioning, but even today, thousands of years later, they are still largely independent, and able to find their own food and breeding partners.

Domestication of horses occurred much later, around 6,000 years ago and, surprisingly, given how important horses have been for transport, farming etc. over many centuries, their behaviour has changed far less than that of dogs and cats. While they benefit from the food, shelter, physical care and protection humans provide, left to their own devices they would still very quickly reassume a feral lifestyle.

There was much, much more. All of it interesting. However I found the animal/human relationship the most intriguing. Probably because I have been around dogs, cats and horses all my life but never, until now, considered how they have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. And how we have helped them do just that. And how they, in turn, have helped us domesticate ourselves. 

A Cup of Kindness

 

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Happy New Year, dear readers. 

Auld Lang Syne means “in old times,” to the Scots people. Robert Burns was trying to keep his beloved Celtic language alive when he popularized it. He described Auld Lang Syne as ‘an old song, of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript until I took it down from an old man’s singing.’  

The town of Bedford Falls sang it at the end of It's a Wonderful Life, when a happy George Bailey finally realizes that his life has been a worthwhile struggle. We sing it at the dawn of a new year, to mark the passage of time. To grieve a little while we promise to do a little better, love a little stronger, be a little kinder. What words could be more poignant as we enter the third year of a global pandemic?

The words say, “We’ll take a cup o’ Kindness yet." That refers to the old tradition of toasting: raising a glass, a “cup o’ kindness,” but I am always moved by the notion of kindness in a cup overflowing, bestowed on each other at the start of each year. 

Kindness. A whole cup of it, I wish to you this new year of 2022, my friends, and beyond.

Canadian Mystery Novels, eh?

 

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At last year's Ontario Library Association's online conference, I sat on a panel about novels set in Canada. The moderator divided the topic into three parts--Canadian characters, settings, and stories--and asked each panelist to discuss one of the sub-topics in relation to one of our novels. To my relief, I was assigned setting, which I considered the easiest of the three. The other two stumped me. When I create characters, I think of them as people, not Canadians, and my stories lean toward the psychological, rather than events particular to Canada.   

I chose Ten Days in Summer, the most Calgarian of my novels, to illustrate how I include specific setting details and how they shaped the story. The novel takes place over the ten days of Calgary's annual Stampede Festival, when the whole city goes wild-west. People wear cowboy hats and boots to go shopping. Beer tents and free pancake breakfasts pop up everywhere. I explained how I looked for opportunities to set scenes at Stampede happenings. Paula, my sleuth, first encounters two of the suspects while she's watching the parade that launches the festival. She later meets one of them in a sports pub featuring an inflatable football player wearing a bandana. Paula's Stampede clothing style is to wear a different coloured bandana each of the ten days. Does that make her uniquely Canadian?

No, but it does make her Calgarian. I realized the characters in my mystery series naturally reflect the people who live in Calgary. In Ten Days, there's a wannabe cowboy. I have several Calgary friends who own horses they board on acreages outside the city and ride on weekends. When I lived in Montreal, I didn't know anyone who did this. Many characters in the series, including Paula, have moved to Calgary from elsewhere. Through its history, Calgary has attracted newcomers during its periodic boom times. In contrast, other locales might be characterized by the absence of family and friends, who have left for greater opportunities. The type of people in any story tells us as much about the place as its landscape. 

I still don't see Paula and friends as particularly Canadian, although readers outside of Canada might notice behaviours I simply see as 'normal'. Maybe Canadian novel characters tend to be remarkably polite. 

Reflections on Canadian characters got me wondering about the third aspect discussed on the panel, uniquely Canadian stories. I find these most noticeable in historical mystery novels, especially ones that fictionalize a real murder from our country's past. In Ten Days in Summer, I had fun making up a crime related to a lessor known fact of Canadian history. King Edward VIII, who famously gave up the British throne to marry Wallis Simpson, was a wannabe cowboy. When he was Prince of Wales, he bought a ranch in southern Alberta, which he visited with his wife after his abdication. My research suggested the Duchess of Windsor was less than enthralled with life on the range. I wove that into an imagined crime that played a small, but pivotal, role in the Ten Days in Summer murder.  

  The Duchess and Duke of Windsor at the E.P. (Edward Prince) Ranch in 1941.  

 The Duke as urban cowboy. 

I have read Canadian mystery novels that deal with contemporary events and issues that are uniquely Canadian. Since the time of U.S. Prohibition in the 1920s, our long and friendly border with the United States has prompted cross-border crime that continues today. Disputes over pipelines and clean drinking water on indigenous reserves have resulted in fictional murders. 

People generally read mystery and thriller novels for entertainment, and in the process learn much about a country's people, place, and stories. When I travel, I like to read novels set in the location I'm visiting. But I also read to learn about myself and my own country.       

I became so intrigued with the subject of uniquely Canadian characters, places and stories that I pitched the idea for a Calgary Public Library program. They've now scheduled the topic for Wednesday, January 26, 7-8 pm, as part of the CPL's Books and Ideas series. I'll be interviewed by Margaret Hadley, a former instructor of Detective Fiction at the University of Calgary. I expect we'll have a lively conversation. You can register for the program here with a CPL card. Non-members are welcome and can email or call the library at 403-260-2600. 

Hope to see you there, eh? 

  

       

                   

Fun With Fleas? by Karla Stover

 

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I admit it, I'm a fan of weird stuff---one reason I love YouTube videos. You can find anything  there. And since I've long been curious about flea circuses, and since we used to go to Seattle's Ye Olde curiosity shop where fleas wearing clothes are on display, I checked YouTube to see if anything was posted. Sure enough, there I saw one harnessed to and struggling to pull a little cart. Probably, only grooming monkeys are fond of fleas but PETA should have stepped in and rescued that flea; it was really straining.

One historical record says in 1742 a watchmaker named Boverick may have used gold to make a small coach and harnessed some fleas to pull it. Another says in 1578 a watchmaker named Mark Scaliot made a lock and chain and attached it to a flea to demonstrate his metalworking skills. There are other claims but it wasn't until the 1820s when the first flea circus showed up courtesy of an Italian named Louis Bertolotto. Using 435 fleas all wearing battle dress, carrying teeny little swords and seated on "golden saddles Bertolotto created a mock-battle, ( he liked to recreate political events of the time )depicting Napoleon's Waterloo defeat. Supposedly, though, in 1764,  a man named John Henry Mauclerc saw a four-wheeled "ivory chaise" with a figure of a man sitting in the chaise which was being drawn by a flea. Possibly more creditable was Charles Manbey Smith who, in 1857, said he saw a "small brass cannon on wheels being drawn by a flea." It cost him a penny to witness this miraculous event. By this time, however, the fleas were of more interest than their accoutrements. Bertolotto soldiered on and his fleas continued performing until sometime in the 1870s. Then a man named John C. Ruhl took a flea circus from Germany to California and small flea circuses entertained people in the United States until the 1960s. However, England did America one better. There was a flea circus at “Belle Vue Zoological Gardens,” in Manchester, England, and it worked until 1970. Not to be bested, some say that every year at Munich, Germany's Oktoberfest a flea circus operates still.

         There are approximately 2,000 flea species but it is the human flea that is used in the             circuses.
         Whether they can actually be trained to do tricks is debatable. They can jump, though,          as many pet owners will testify so if they're close to a ball, jumping might push                     it. Their natural jumping behavior could then be interpreted by the audience as a                    ‘trick’. By placing objects, such as a ball near the flea, the flea could then ‘push’ or             move it. With no one to care about the welfare of the fleas, glue was also used to                 fasten them to the  an attraction. Their struggles to get "free from the glue made                 some people think they were  having fun."

        Here are a couple pictures, but for those truly interested, check out eBay. Like             me, you might be surprised.