It would be easy to dismiss January as the “hangover month.” It certainly starts out that way, but hangovers don’t typically last all month and in all of recorded history January has, so there must be a better description. Things that last all of January include holiday bills, football, coldness, and the desire to be in any other month. Unlike months which either have something notable about them or that lead to other months that do, January doesn’t do much but deliver us to February and, as you’ll see next month, that’s the weirdest one of the year.
January is named for the Roman god Janus, who was the gatekeeper. The month had a troubled childhood, not even existing in the earliest Roman calendars, and it came into being only to help keep the rest of the calendar in line with the actual astronomical events giving us seasons. January is the time of resolution making and breaking and is welcomed gleefully by owners of gyms, diet products, running clothes manufacturers, and is rued by alcohol producers, dessert makers, and cigarette distributors. By the end of the month, those groups switch places thanks to the fact that resolution breaking is one of the great American pastimes. Makers of products like Spandex think January is super, since it seems to win with both groups of people.
More vacations get planned in January than in any other month, since thinking about anything but January is good for mental health in the middle of winter. The days successively get longer as the month moves further along, but that only serves to make the month seem longer. That January is the longest month of the year and February is the shortest one is a sadistic joke of early calendar makers. Why not average out January with February? We could give one of January’s days to February and everyone would be happy. Think about it. If you moved Martin Luther King day to February, you’d have a holiday to break up February and you’d lose a day in January to boot. 30 and 29 days for the first two months makes sense and on leap years, you’d have 30 and 30.
OK. So much for my attempt at societal engineering. I close with a few important celebrations for the month. They include National Fruitcake Toss Day (Jan. 3), National Static Electricity Day (Jan. 9), and National Hugging Day (Jan. 21). My own personal favorite, though is National Personal Trainer Awareness Day (Jan. 2), which I’m looking forward to primarily because I, like millions of others, was unaware I even had a personal trainer. Go figure.
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