View from the North 40 : Celebrate the old you this New Year

Call me a snowflake, I don’t care, but I refuse to participate in the scam called New Year’s resolutions because it is an affront to my emotional well-being.

You know the drill. Along with lists of Top 10 Whatevers of the Year, along with the Best This and the Worst That recaps, we get this pressure to come up with awesome ways we are going become the new and improved version of ourselves — eat right, get more sleep, exercise more, lose weight, get a raise/promotion/better job, stop swearing, be grateful, read more intellectual stuff, make more time for family, downsize, upsize, simplify, organize.

It’s like being a self-centered, lazy slob living in an overfilled, rundown shack of a house, eating chocolate cake for supper at 1 a.m. isn’t good enough.

I blame Pope Gregory XIII. I know it’s been 430-some-odd years since he was supreme ruler of the Catholic Church in Rome, and I have nothing against the church itself, or Pope Francis of our modern times, for that matter. He seems like a pretty cool cat, and I could probably hang with him.

But that Pope Gregory XIII is at the heart of that whole self-help, you-don’t-measure-up, buy-my-book industry. Him and those Gutenberg press people.

You would think that Tom Hanks and Dan Brown would have gotten all over this after cracking the DaVinci Code, but apparently it’s all on me to explain this archaic history. I’m OK with the heavy lifting here.

Here’s the true story of New Year:

Once upon a time in the year 1440 this German dude named Johannes Gutenberg invented the first-ever movable type printing press, and one of the first things he did was print up a ton of these Bibles, called Gutenberg Bibles (that’s original), and in the process he put a bunch of monks and monks-in-the-making out of work because their good penmanship skills weren’t needed anymore to write hand copies of the Bible.

Admittedly, it took several decades for the presses to get rolling strong, but eventually, the Gutenberg press and all the knock-off presses that followed replaced all those monks — who weren’t unionized, so essentially, they were just wandering around underfoot.

Cut to the Vatican in 1582 where Pope Gregory was expressing his dissatisfaction with the stupid calendars that had to be adjusted every so many years because Earth has an extra quarter of a day — which never made sense to me, but I like to think some of those aimless monks stepped up and said, “Hey, Greg, I’m not just a pretty pen. I can help you with those maths. My school was strong on STEM.”

These masterminds invented the calendar system we use to this day, called the Gregorian calendar (go figure).

Now, here’s the part that annoys me. Pope Gregory could’ve put the first day of the year anywhere. He commissioned the calendar. It was named after him. It was his deal. He could’ve made the winter solstice New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day.

But no.

He was walking around, tripping over out-of-work monks, bumping into stacks of these mass-produced Bibles and thinking about how Pope Julius I set a precedence 1,250-some-odd years earlier to not put Christmas on the solstice because the pagans had already earmarked the day for themselves, so he had to be different, too. And then he had a revelation:.

The pagans stayed up all night on the solstice dancing and drinking. The Christians ate too much and wallowed in an excess of giving on Christmas (it became a nightmare of consumerism pretty early on in history. True story).

Let’s have a whole ’nother day of celebration to capitalize on the guilt from the people’s excesses, he thought.

“We’ll give everybody another day off,” he said (because they were big on giving vacations to peasants back in the day), “and send these pointless monks out with all these extra Bibles to show people the error of their ways and give them step-by-step tips from God on how they can improve.”

The plan was both brilliant, practical and simple.

Of course, the irony is that the secular folks hijacked Pope Gregory’s New Year and have made a killing off their own self-help market with books, videos, articles, medications, classes, training systems, et cetera, that make you feel guilty for being who you are every day and for subsequently failing to become someone you’re not overnight.

And we start this work toward the new us with one last fling, staying up too late and drinking, because nothing declares our resolve to better ourselves like sleep deprivation and a hangover.

I, on the other hand, resolve to continue ambling through life, laughing at inappropriate times, swearing and eating too much, underachieving and not making lists that I won’t follow anyway.

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Yeah, pretty much, I have no will power at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40.