Happy New Year!

Today is New Year's Day. Various New Year traditions have been celebrated for a long time — the earliest recorded celebration was in about 2000 B.C. in Mesopotamia, where the new year was celebrated in mid-March, around the time of the vernal equinox. Iranians and Balinese still celebrate the new year with the spring equinox. The Chinese New Year is based around the lunar cycles, and it can fall between late January and late February. In Europe, the Celtic New Year began on November 1st, after the harvest.

The first time that New Year's Day was celebrated on January 1st was in 45 B.C., when Caesar redid the Roman calendar. He based it on the sun instead of the moon (like the Egyptians), added some days to the year, and declared every January 1st the start of the new year. But Caesar had subtly miscalculated the length of the solar year, and declared an extra day in February every four years, which turned out to be slightly too often, so that by the Middle Ages the calendar was about 10 days off. It wasn't until the 1570s that the calendar was finally refined with leap years in the correct places, and since then, January 1st has been celebrated as New Year's Day.

It's the birthday of J.D. Salinger, (books by this author) born in New York City in 1919. He wanted to be a writer, and his dream was to publish his fiction in The New Yorker, which rejected his work over and over. In November of 1941, he finally got an acceptance letter from The New Yorker for a short story called "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," about a teenager named Holden Caulfield. It was set to come out in the Christmas issue, but then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the story was put on hold. Salinger was drafted into the Army, deployed in the ground force invasion of Normandy, and he was part of the Battle of the Bulge and some of the worst fighting of WWII. When the war ended, Salinger checked into an Army general hospital in Nuremberg, suffering from shell shock. In 1946, The New Yorker finally published "Slight Rebellion Off Madison." Salinger took the character of Holden Caulfield, and he wrote an entire novel about him. And even though it got mixed reviews and Salinger refused to help with publicity at all, it was a best seller: The Catcher in the Rye (1951). And Salinger became a celebrity, which he hated, so he became a recluse. He died just this past January (2010), at the age of 91.