Every December, we sing 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 name comes from calare — “to call out, proclaim”: the pontiffs announced the new moon and the days ahead. Of all the kalends, 1 January was the loudest: Rome opened its political year with wishes, gifts and fortune-telling.

Gifts of good omen

On 1 January, Romans gave one another strenae — luck-bearing gifts: branches of bay and palm, honey sweetmeats, figs and dates, later coins. Ovid stages Rome's New Year in Book 1 of the Fasti; the custom lasted into the fifth century, though abolished several times by edict.

An encomium of the Kalends

Around 392 or 393 — the exact date is uncertain — the rhetor Libanius of Antioch delivered an encomium of the Kalends: a night of revelry on the eve, gifts flowing down the social ladder, like a school of generosity. The pagan praises what the bishops, in the same century, labour to extinguish.

The same mechanism, in French: étrennes, the New Year presents, also come from strenae.

Chapter 3 · Rome → the Slavs → Romania

The word travels north

Between Rome and the first Romanian attestation, the word takes a detour through Slavic. The dictionaries say plainly how: calendae → kolenda → colindă.

The chain, after the dictionaries:

1. CALENDAE
2. →
3. KOLENDA
4. →
5. COLINDĂ

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

• MDA2: “vsl. KOLENDA, lat. calendae” — Old Slavonic, from Latin; the noun colind was formed later, from the verb.

• 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).

Six cousins in six languages

This is how kolenda sounds at the neighbours' — every pairing after the Etymological Dictionary:

• bg koleda “the Christmas feast”
• sb kole(n)da “carol”
• rus koljadá “carol”
• cz koleda “collection, whip-round”
• hu koleda “collection, whip-round”
• gr kalanda · καλανδα “greeting song for the first day of the New Year”

A small map, as much as a word earns

The game · match the cousin to the language

Whose New Year is it?

Six rounds: every cousin of colindă looks for its language. Choose the answer, 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 via Slavic — kolenda — with a crossed variant (corindă, in Transylvania). A direct heir, *cărinde, is only the Etymological Dictionary's hypothesis.

• “The Church banned the Christmas carols.”

  No: it banned the pagan January Kalends — the revelling, the disguises, the gifts. The Christmas carol is the survivor, not the target.

• “Trullo killed the festival.”

  No: Canon 62 ordered its abolition, on heavy penalty. But the word is sung every December, almost two millennia after Rome.

What we don't know (said aloud)

• U1. Which Gallic synod and which canon banned the stag and the gifts — Mâcon or Auxerre, and with what Latin text. Hence this page says “the Gallic synods, c. 578–585”.

• U2. The number of Augustine's 404 sermon and its exact words. Hence this page gives no number and no quote.

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

• U6. The exact date of Libanius' encomium — 392 or 393 — and its closing words. Hence this page gives the range and does not quote the close.

• U7. Whether *cărinde ever existed. It is the Etymological Dictionary's hypothesis; 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. The exact “two thousand years” arithmetic — unanchored. Hence this page says “almost two millennia”, and “two thousand Decembers” as an engine title, not arithmetic.

• U10. The Trullo dating — 691 or 692 — and a printed Romanian translation of Canon 62. Hence this page gives the range, and the editors translate.