On Wednesday, September 11, 2024, Ethiopia entered 2017. This New Year’s celebration, typically reserved for December by the rest of the world, left many non-Ethiopian netizens confused.

But here’s the reason why Ethiopia is 7 years behind the rest of the world. It is said that Africans took Christianity to Europe. 

The first non-Hebrew to be a Christian was an Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26-39). There's an Amharic Bible, an African language spoken in Ethiopia, more than 1000 years before the English Bible in 1526. 

It's not a time warp or a sci-fi plot twist; it's all about the Ethiopian calendar. Ethiopia uses the Ge'ez calendar, which is based on the ancient Alexandrian or Coptic calendar. 

This calendar has its own way of counting years, starting from what they consider the conception of Jesus, not his birth, which sets it about 7-8 years behind the Gregorian calendar we use. 

The Ethiopian year is made up of 12 months of 30 days each, plus a 13th month of 5 or 6 days. This structure keeps their year slightly out of sync with our solar year, leading to a unique leap year system.

While we're shouting “Happy New Year” on January 1st, Ethiopians celebrate their New Year, Enkutatash, on September 11th or 12th. 

This means for part of the year, Ethiopia's calendar year is 8 years behind, and for the rest, it's 7. 

This calendar thing, isn't just about dates though; it's a symbol of Ethiopia's rich cultural heritage and its historical independence from colonial rule, which often brought changes even to timekeeping. 

The Gregorian calendar reform, introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, corrected the inaccuracies of the Julian calendar by adjusting leap years and skipping ten days to realign with the solar year, ensuring more accurate dating of Easter and other seasonal events.