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Birth lore · Your birthday

Your birthday · Month 1

Born in January

January takes its name from Janus, the two-faced Roman god of doorways and beginnings. Its birthstone is the garnet and its flowers are the carnation and the snowdrop.

Le duc de Berry, assis en bas à droite, dos au feu, est habillé de bleu et coiffé d'un bonnet de fourrure. Il invite ses gens et ses proches à se présenter à lui. Derrière lui figure l'inscription « Approche…
Le duc de Berry, assis en bas à droite, dos au feu, est habillé de bleu et coiffé d'un bonnet de fourrure. Il invite ses gens et ses proches à se présenter à lui. Derrière lui figure l'inscription « Approche…Limbourg brothers · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

The name and the season

January is named after Janus, the Roman god of gates, doorways and beginnings, who was shown with two faces looking backwards and forwards at once. Roman tradition credited King Numa Pompilius with adding January and February to an older ten-month calendar that had begun in March. The Roman consuls took office on 1 January from 153 BCE, and Julius Caesar's reform of 46 BCE confirmed it as the start of the civil year, although much of medieval Europe preferred to begin the year at Christmas, at the Annunciation on 25 March or at Easter. The Anglo-Saxons, according to Bede, called the month Æfterra Geola, 'after Yule'. In the northern hemisphere it is usually the coldest month, a season of short days and long nights.

Festivals and folklore

New Year's Day opened the month with gifts and good wishes in Rome (the strenae) and has kept its customs of resolutions and 'first-footing', the Scottish belief that the first visitor across the threshold brings the luck of the year. The Christian feast of the Epiphany on 6 January closes the Twelve Days of Christmas and commemorates the visit of the Magi; churches that keep the Julian calendar celebrate Christmas itself on 7 January. In the cider counties of England, apple orchards were 'wassailed' around Twelfth Night with songs, toast and cider to wake the trees, and Plough Monday marked the return to farm work. In years when the new moon falls early, the Chinese lunar new year also begins in the last days of January.

Birthstone and birth flower

The garnet is January's stone in both the modern American list of 1912 and the older traditional lists. Its name is usually derived from the Latin for pomegranate, whose seeds the small red crystals resemble, and it was valued in Roman and Anglo-Saxon jewellery, most famously in the garnet cloisonné of the Sutton Hoo treasure. Lapidary tradition linked it with constancy, protection on journeys and faithful friendship. January's flowers are the carnation and the snowdrop; in the Victorian 'language of flowers' the snowdrop meant hope, a fitting emblem for a month when the first white bells appear in frozen ground.

Traits tradition gives to people born this month

Birth-month lore is a gentle folk tradition rather than a doctrine, and its portraits overlap with the two sun signs of the month, Capricorn and Aquarius. January people are traditionally described as determined, practical and quietly ambitious, people who make plans and keep them, like the god who looks ahead while remembering what lies behind. Popular almanacs add that they can be reserved, slow to show their feelings and inclined to work too hard, while those born towards the end of the month are credited with an independent, inventive streak. Like all birth-date characterisations, these are cultural associations: studies have not found that the month or sign of birth predicts personality.