Every December, we sing a word that leads back to a Roman date

Chapter 1 · Rome

A Roman date

Before it was a carol, the word was a calendar date: the first of the month, proclaimed out loud.

The proclaimed day

Calendae simply means the 1st of each Roman month. The Romans themselves linked the name to calare — “to call out, proclaim”: Varro explains it through the old pontifical practice of proclaiming, at the month's opening, whether the Nones would fall on the fifth or the seventh. Of all the kalends, 1 January grew the loudest: from 153 BC, 1 January also opened the Roman consular year, with wishes, gifts and fortune-telling.

Gifts of good omen

On 1 January, Romans gave one another strenae — luck-bearing gifts. Ovid, in Book 1 of the Fasti, asks what dates, wrinkled figs and honey in a snow-white jar are for — and money, since Janus takes it for granted that gold pleases more than honey. Bay branches belong to the wider history of the strenae, not to Ovid's page — proof that two good sources, combined carelessly, breed a false detail. Kalends customs stayed alive deep into Late Antiquity despite repeated episcopal criticism — and in the East the Kalends kept its status as a legal holiday.

An encomium of the Kalends

Around 392 or 393 — the conventional dating, not a secure one; some scholars call the speech undatable — the rhetor Libanius of Antioch composed an encomium of the Kalends: a night of revelry on the eve, gifts flowing down the social ladder, like a school of generosity. The encomium describes a party, not a religion: around 400, many participants probably did not experience the Kalends as “paganism”. They experienced gifts, visits and feasts.

The same mechanism, in French: étrennes, the New Year presents, also come from strenae — a lexical fossil as clean as ours (TLFi).

Chapter 3 · The word's routes

The word travels — by several routes

Between Rome and the first Romanian attestation, the Kalends family branches. The dictionaries say plainly how: Latin reaches Romanian both through Slavic and directly.

The chain, after the dictionaries:

1. CALENDAE
2. →
3. *KOLĘDA
4. →
5. COLINDĂ

• DEX ’09: “Din sl. kolenda.” — the Slavic step, plain and short.

• MDA2: “vsl. колѧнда, lat. calendae” — Old Slavonic, from Latin. And the dictionary's morphological analysis of the noun colind as a back-formation from the verb colinda does not mean the noun is younger in the texts: colind is attested in ANON. CAR., the verb in Barac.

• DER: “Sl. kolęda ‘the first day of the year', and Slavic from Lat. călendae” — with eight scholarly references (Miklosich, Cihac, Meyer, Byhan, Romanski, Vasmer, Berneker, DAR). The Old Slavic form is written *kolęda, reconstructed, while Slavonic attests колѧда or колѧнда.

One Latin family, different routes

The words below are kin, but they did not travel together: Greek took one road, Slavic another, and Hungarian borrowed late, from Slavic. Meanings differ from language to language — the diversity is the story.

The Greek branch: from Latin, no Slavic

• gr kálanta · κάλαντα “carols” — house-to-house songs at Christmas, New Year and Epiphany

The Slavic branch: from Latin, through *kolęda

• bg Koleda · Коледа “Christmas” — the feast itself, not the song
• sb/hr koleda, kolenda “carol”
• rus koljadá · коляда a Christmas custom of going house to house, singing
• pol kolęda “carol” — but also the priest's pastoral round of the parish houses, with its gifts
• cz koleda “carol”
• rom colindă a Christmas and New Year song

Later: from Slavic into Hungarian

• hu koleda house blessings and gift collection at Epiphany — first attested 1778, a Slavic loan, probably from Slovak

A diagram, as much as a word earns

Worth keeping

Two stories, not one

The etymology is secure; the ritual continuity is not.

Some folklorists — Petru Caraman, in Colindatul la români, slavi și la alte popoare (1983) — have argued for substantial continuities between the Roman and Balkan New Year complex and later customs. Others — Ivan Lozica, on Croatian koleda — warn that word history alone does not prove ritual history: the two must be investigated separately. It is a live scholarly question, not a dictionary verdict.

The game · which road did it take?

Which road did it take?

Six rounds: every kin of colindă took a different road out of Latin. Choose the road, read the point, collect score. The scoreboard stays on your device.

Two numbers

The whole story, squeezed into two figures:

Three wrong sayings

You hear them every December. They do not hold:

• “Colindă descends in a straight line from Latin.”

  No: it comes through Slavic — *kolęda — with a crossed variant (corindă, in Transylvania). The secure direct heir from Latin is another word: cărindar, the folk name of January.

• “The Church banned the Christmas carols.”

  No: it attacked the customs of the January Kalends — the revelling, the disguises, the gifts. The link between those practices and the Romanian carol is a question of cultural history, separate from the word's etymology.

• “Canon 62 failed — witness today's carols.”

  No: the canon proves the practices were alive in 692. Today's carols do not measure its “failure” — those are two stories, not one.

What we don't know (said aloud)

• U1 · closed. The Gallic synod — closed in the rebuild: Auxerre, Canon 1 (561–605), calf and stag plus the “diabolical custom of the strenae”, alongside Tours 567 (fasting and offices). Mâcon leaves the page.

• U2 · closed. Augustine's sermon — closed in the rebuild: Dolbeau 26 (Mainz 62), Carthage, 1 January 404, about two and a half hours (Grig, chapter 6).

• U5 · closed. The ANON. CAR. dating — closed at build time: Chivu 2021, “Banat–Hunedoara, mid-17th century, around 1650”.

• U6. The dating of Libanius's encomium — conventionally 392 or 393, after the rhetor's death (c. 393); some scholars call it undatable. Hence this page gives the conventional range and says it is debated.

• U7. Whether *cărinde ever existed. It is an older hypothesis of Romanian etymology, taken up by Ciorănescu; this page says so.

• U8 · closed. The carol fragment — closed at build time: four lines from “Florile dalbe”, after the Alecsandri collection (1866), public domain; NOT from Marienescu 1859, which the sibling page carries.

• U9 · closed. The “two thousand years” arithmetic — closed in the rebuild: the old timeline title was retired; the timeline is now called “From 1 January to Christmas”.

• U10. The Trullo dating — 691 or 692 — and a printed Romanian translation of Canon 62. Hence this page gives the range, and the Romanian canon is in Marius Comper's translation.