Everything was fine until the Catholic Church decided they wanted in on the Pagan action and moved New Years from March 25 to Jan 1...................
Christian nations did not agree in the
date of New Year's Day.
They were not opposed to 1 January as the beginning of the year, but rather to the
pagan extravagances which accompanied it.
Evidently the natural opening of the year, the springtime, together with the Jewish opening of the sacred year, Nisan, suggested the propriety of putting the beginning in that beautiful season. Also, the Dionysian method (so named from the Abbot Dionysius, sixth century) of dating events from the coming of Christ became an important factor in New Year calculations.
The Annunciation, with which Dionysius began the
Christian era, was fixed on 25 March, and became New Year's Day for
England, in early times and from the thirteenth century to 1 Jan., 1752, when the present custom was introduced there. Some countries (e.g.,
Germany) began with
Christmas, thus being almost in harmony with the ancient Germans, who made the winter solstice their starting-point.
Notwithstanding the movable
Easter,
France and the Low Countries took it as the first day of the year, while
Russia, up to the eighteenth century, made September the first month. The western nations, however, since the sixteenth, or, at the latest, the eighteenth century, have adopted and retained the first of January.
In Christian liturgy the Church does not refer to the first of the year, any more than she does to the fact that the first Sunday of Advent is the first day of the ecclesiastical year.