January

January, month of empty pockets! Let us endure this evil month, anxious as a theatrical producer's forehead.
-- Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

The first month of the year on Julian and Gregorian calendars, well known in America and the UK as being bleak and depressing. January has 31 days, which is quite a few too many.

January includes:

• January 1. New Years Day (although most of us don't celebrate that nearly as much as we celebrate New Years Eve)
• The 3rd Monday in January is Martin Luther King Day in America.
• January 26th is Australia Day in Australia.
• January 26th is also Republic Day in India

January is here, with eyes that keenly glow,
A frost-mailed warrior
striding a shadowy steed of snow.
-- Edgar Fawcett

January was originally known as Januarius mensis in Latin, 'the month of Janus'. Janus was the god of portals, and also of beginnings and endings. Originally, January was not the first month of the year in the Roman calendar; that was March. But in 153 BC King Numa Pompilius (we think it was he) added on two more months, including January, to make the calender fit the solar year better.

It is deep January. The sky is hard.
The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
-- Wallace Stevens, No Possum, No Sop, No Taters

Birthstone: Garnet (Constancy)

Flower: Carnation or Snowdrop.

January is also:

• National Soup Month
• National Hobby Month

Sour Grapes (1921)
by
William Carlos Williams

January

Again I reply to the triple winds 
running chromatic fifths of derision 
outside my window: 
                               Play louder.
You will not succeed. I am 
bound more to my sentences 
the more you batter at me 
to follow you. 
                     And the wind, 
as before, fingers perfectly 
its derisive music. 

But in this instance the poet has employed a music phrase "Chromatic fifths. A fifth is the intermission sandwiched between C and G, D and A, and so on. By itself a fifth has a pleasurable sound. "Chromatic" refers to movement up or down a scale; when you move chromatically, you move by half-steps: C to C#, C# to D, and so on. The effect of chromatic fifths is at once grating and disconcerting.

Sources:

Public domain text taken from The Poets' Corner:
http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/wcw-sg2.html#12

Janus was the god of doors and gateways, janua is latin for door. He had two faces so he could guard the entrance and exit.

You would think that January is the first month of the year because Janus is the god of beginnings. Nope. The oldest Roman calendar is only 10 months. Notice how it goes to December (tenth, as in Decagram).

Around 700 B.C. the calendar was readjusted and two months were added. They were the eleventh and twelfth months, Januarius and Februarius. The first was because there was a feast in honor of Janus. February was so named because it contained the Roman festival of purification (februum).

March continued to be the first month of the year until well after the Christian era begun. March 25, the date of the vernal equinox (and also the first day of spring), in the Julian Calendar.

The advent of the Gregorian calendar made January the first month and January 1st New Year's Day. This was prescribed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 to fix the errors in the Julian Calendar. It wasn't adopted in England and the colonies until 1752.

My facts taken from Thereby Hangs a Tale: Stories of Curious Word Origins by Charles Earle Funk.

Jan"u*a*ry (?), n. [L. Januarius, fr. Janus an old Latin deity, the god of the sun and the year, to whom the month of January was sacred; cf. janua a door, Skr. ya to go.]

The first month of the year, containing thirty-one days.

⇒ Before the adoption of New Style, the commencement of the year was usually reckoned from March 25.

© Webster 1913.