by Franklin T. Wike, Jr.
As we get ready for another new year and I prepare to tear down the old calendars, in order to make enough room so that I can put up new ones, I could not help but wonder why we have 31 days in certain months while others only have 30 days. Then there is the question of February, where we only have 28 days – unless it is a leap yea. This all seems a little confusing to me at times and I’ve wondered why we couldn’t simply have the same number of days in each month.
As I was thinking about the number of days in a month, I also began to wonder who decided on the names we use for various months and days, so I decided to do a little research and get some answers. I expected to find that some Joe Blow in Washington picked names out of a hat, but was actually quite surprised at the answers I found. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that the Chinese had a different calendar, but I never knew that there are actually around 40 different calendars used in the world today.
It seems the origin of the calendar started back in ancient times, when the farmers needed to keep track of the seasons in order to know when it was time to plant their crops. Therefore, come calendars are based on the various seasons of the year, while others are based on astronomy.
The legal code of the United States does not actually specify an official national calendar. The fact that we use the Gregorian calendar in the United States stems from an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1751, which specified the use of the Gregorian calendar in England and its colonies.
The Day
One day, as we know it, is based on the rotation of the Earth on its axis.
Days were originally kept track of by observing the sun. Early days were counted as starting at sundown; the Jewish days still are. One cycle of dark followed by light was called a day. The Babylonians used a 12 digit numbering system because it could be divided equally by 2, 3, 4, or 6. So by using their system of time keeping, there were 12 “hours” of night followed by 12 “hours” of light, but their hours consisted of an unequal length of time. In the summer, each light “hour” could have been 75 minutes by our measurement, while the night hours could have been 45 minutes in length by our standards. In the winter it would have been the opposite. So, their 11th hour of daylight would be the same as our 8 PM in summer and 5 PM in winter.
Noon was the easiest to determine; the shadow on a sun dial would be a line going north and south. However, once we had clocks, they switched to equal hours so that the clock speed would not have to be changed twice a day and so they wouldn’t need various lengths of candles to determine the time of night.
They didn’t want to start a new day in the middle of the work period, so they used the opposite time of midnight. When we changed so that the days started at midnight, the evening (from sundown to midnight) was referred to as the eve of the day that arrives at midnight. This is where we get Christmas Eve, New Years Eve, etc.
Week Day Names
The Greeks called all of the lights in the sky that wandered or moved “Planetes.” Today, we translate that as Planets. Therefore, the Roman calendar had its days of the week named after the moving lights – or planets – which they considered to be gods. The Romans considered the sun and moon as planets because the also wandered the sky, so we have:
Sunday (the Sun’s day).
Monday (the Moon’s day).
Tuesday (Tiw’s day – Old Norse’s equivalent of planet and god of Mars).
Wednesday (Wooden’s day – Old Norse’s equivalent of Mercury).
Thursday (Thor’s day – Old Norse’s equivalent of Jupiter).
Friday (Friggs day – Old Norse’s equivalent of Venus).
Saturday (Saturn’s day).
As a result, we still have the days of the week named after the 7 “planets” that were known in ancient times.
Weeks
Our English word “week” comes from the Teutonic word for “change” – indicating the change of the phases of the moon.
In Babylonian times (600 BC), they worshiped the moon. As a celebration of every full moon, the start of the month (moonth), they would have a worship service and everybody go off work that day and went to worship service where there was eating, drinking and dancing. They called this Sappatu and the name came to English as the Sabbath.
Work productivity actually went up when they started this, so they started another worship service at the new moon (in the middle of the month). This gave two days a month off. After awhile, production still went up, so they tried a day off at the quarter moons also.
The people really enjoyed having 4 days off each month, but they did have a complaint: their months were either 29 or 30 days long, based on their observation of the first crescent. Therefore, some of the time it was 7 days from one day off to to the next while other times it was 8 days. It became a little confusing, so they stopped having the Sabbath (as the 4 days off in a month were called) based on the moon, and had it every 7 days instead.
The Babylonians chose every seventh day because they liked the number 7. It was magic because if you took a circle (such as a coin), you could put 6 other same size circles (coins) around it and they could all touch the center and their neighbors.
That was the number of planets they knew of and the planets were gods and the days of the weeks were named after the gods.
The Jewish people who were captives (slaves) of the Babylonians got every 7th day off so they could worship. So even when they escaped, they kept worshiping on the Sabbath. Yo this day, they still use a modified version of calendar the Babylonians developed thousands of years ago.
Early Christians observed the Sabbath (Jewish worship), and the day after the Sabbath (now considered the first day of the week) as the day they worshiped Christ. When the Roman empire converted to Christianity, they took the first day of the week as the day of worship and a day off and the 7 days per week became official.
The second day off did not come about until after 1945 (after World War II), because there were too many workers. It was the Sabbath (our Saturday, the 7th day of the week) out of consideration of the Jews who had suffered greatly during the war.
Months
One month is based on the time it takes for one revolution of the Moon around the Earth.
Month Names
The names for various months, came from the Roman calendar:
March was the first month of the year. It was named after Mars – the god of war.
April came from the word meaning ‘after’ or ‘second.’
May was named for the goddess Miai, the goddess of increase.
June was named for the goddess Juno, the queen of the gods and the goddess of marriage (I guess that even in Roman times there were a lot of June brides).
July was originally called Quintillis (Latin for 5), but it was renamed for Julius Caesar and became July.
August was originally Sextillia (Latin for six),but was renamed for Caesar Augustus and became August.
September came from the word for seven (septem).
October came from the word for eight (octo).
November came from the word nine (novem).
December came from the word ten (decem).
February was the last month of the year and it was named after Februariua, the ritual for atonement.
January: In 154 B.C., the Roman senate started meeting at the start of the month after December, which was called January after the god Janus, a temple god who could look forward and backward at the same time. They started calling January 1 the start of the new year.
Month Length
Early calendars followed the moon – where we get our word for month. They had 29 to 30 days in a month. Alternating between 20 and 30 days would keep the calendar in step with the moon phase. The actual average days in a month is 29.530588
Food-raising cultures had to keep track of the seasons and wanted their calendars to do it for them, but a pure lunar calendar was 11.2422 days too short. So, they added an extra month to the year every three years to get the calendar back in step with the seasons. So on the average, the year would come out about right and this is called a lunar-solar calendar. Most cultures with lunar calendars used this method. The Hebrew and Chinese calendars still use this method.
The early Roman calendar also added an extra month and it was controlled by the senate. They would keep adding the extra month in a year so their term would run longer (you know how some politicians are). In 45 B.C., the calendar was so far off that Julius Caesar reformed the calendar and took it off the lunar cycle and put it on the solar cycle.
Leap Year
The year -45 has been called the “year of confusion” because in that year Julius Caesar inserted 90 days to bring the months of the Roman calendar back to their traditional place with respect to the seasons. This was Caesar’s first step in replacing a calendar that has gone awry.
Although the pre-Julian calendar was lunar-solar in inspiration, its months no longer followed the lunar phases and its year had lost step with the cycle of seasons.
Following the advice of Sosigenes, an Alexandrine astronomer, Caesar created a solar calendar with twelve months of fixed lengths and a provision for an extra day to be added every fourth year. As a result, the average length of the Julian calendar was 365.25 days. This was fairly consistent with the length of the tropical year as it was known at that time.
It started out as 5 months with 30 days and 6 months as 31 days and one month (February) having 29 days and becoming 30 for leap year. The beginning of each third month was the start of another season.
Following Caesar’s death, the Roman authorities misapplied the leap year rule, with the result that every third – rather than every fourth – year had an extra day added. Although detailed evidence is lacking, it is generally believed that Emperor Augustus corrected the situation by changing the days that had been previously entered during the Julian years -8 through +4. After this, the Julian calendar finally began to function as planned. But Augustus Caesar wanted a month named for him since he fixed the calendar.
The only month that didn’t have a holiday already assigned was the month after the one given to Julius (July), but it only had 30 days in it. So, to not be outdone by Julius, he stole a day from February.
How long is the Calendar?
If you think the calendar is 365 days long, think again. The solar year is actually 365.2421896698 days. The calendar is not the same as the solar year/ It is, however, an attempt to combine days, weeks and months into a regular pattern to match a sequence of solar years.
Think of it this way: a 365 day calendar is actually shorter than a solar year, and a 366 day calendar is too long, but the combination of three regular calendar years (“common years”) plus a leap year comes very close to matching a sequence of four solar years.
Julius Caesar thought the match was close enough when he instituted the Julian Calendar. By combining three common years with a leap year, they got a calendar year which is 365.25 days long. But this means the Julian Calendar was, in reality, a little bit too long.
This caused the calendar to have about ¼ extra days every century, and the seasons were getting later in the calendar all the time. So, Pope Gregory adopted a new calendar (in 1582) that corrected it by ¼ days per century. His calendar would not have a leap year on the years ending in 00, such as 1700, 1800, 1900, 2000, etc. Gives 365.2425 days on the average.
To adjust the calendar so that Ester occurred closer to spring as it was in the olden days (325 C.E..), he had 10 days deleted from the calendar so the day after October 4, 1582, would be October 15, 1582. The whole purpose was to have spring occur on March 21, or as close as possible.
The countries that were predominately Catholic adopted the calendar; the protestant countries adopted it later. England (and the United States of America as her colony) adopted the calendar in 1752, and to get the calendars to agree, September 2, 1752, was followed by September 14, 1752 (missing 11 days).
This is the calendar we use today – called the Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian calendar still accumulates an error of one day about every 2500 years. Although various adjustments to the leap year system have bee proposed, none have been instituted.
Trivia
Blue Moon
Sometimes there are two moons in a month and there is a special name for the second moon, the Blue Moon. This occurs because the lunar cycle is about 29.5 days and there are 30 or 31 days in a month, except February. It is possible that February does not have a full moon in it at all, then January or March could have two moons.
The Blue Moon occurs on the average of once every 2.7 years. This is where the expression “once in a Blue Moon” comes from, indicating something that occurs infrequently.
Holidays
Many holidays, (Holy Days – days special to the gods) are based upon the start of seasons or the middle of the season, i.e. mid Winter, mid Summer, etc.
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