It’s a rotten calendar that makes Jan. 2 the second day of the year. In the old days, putting down the Emperor’s calendar could get you locked up & even sent to the lions. Render unto Uncle Julius, Augustus, Juno & Mayo their due. (March madness is its own matter.)
Despite various “reforms,” one losing more than a week of days that never existed, the still pre-modern Gregorian calendar in dominant use has gotten even more confused & out of whack with the events & bodies that make up the timed year, so we not only sometimes get two full moons in a single month, but the 7th month (September) comes 9th, the 8th (October) comes 10th, all the way to the 10th (December) coming12th. Who thunk that up?
The confusion was compounded whenever the seasonal borders got conceptually shifted from midway between the solstices & equinoxes, where they naturally belong, to the solstices & equinoxes themselves, which more naturally represent the peaks of their respective seasons. Midsummer night is more or less June 21-22, the longest daylight in the northern hemisphere. Midwinter night belongs on or near its solstice. The equinoxes are equally mid-points, early & late seasonal halves in balance. Some of the old seasonal division points are still there, celebrated indirectly, without conscious or explicit reference to seasonal shift, as in Halloween & Groundhog day. The shift in borders was entirely conceptual, and whenever it was, it seems rather recent, as suggested by the location of “midsummer night.” Meanwhile we can count on weather reporters to comment on pre-solstice storms things like “and it’s not even winter yet!” and do the same for pre-equinox spring & pre-midsummer summer events. It’s not a complicated argument. If winter is cosmologically aligned with shortness of daylight, the solstice is its peak, or trough if you’re down under. The solstices and equinoxes signify the border between early in that season & late. In the case of the solstices, the difference in which half represents that between waxing & waning, the daily increase & decrease in daylight (with an equivalent rising & lowering in the sun’s angle of arc). This highly dislocated conceptual calendar framework is far from universally followed, even by people who use it daily. Its flaws are deep, and its history murky. It would hardly rank in a rational process for choosing a global standard. Its dominance in official use can be considered an accident of commerce & conquest, whether imposed by imperial administrators or adopted for convenience without entirely leaving other calendars behind. So Jews, Muslims, and countless other cultures have retained their own even while doing business with Pope Gregory’s. Probably the most widely known of these alternatives is represented by so-called “Chinese New Year,” which assumes the year begins more or less mid-way between the winter solstice & the spring equinox. This was Basho’s calendar, too, extremely widespread and functional still. It is based on a lunisolar calendar, in synch with both moon & sun. Technically, the year begins a certain number of new moons after the moon with the winter solstice, putting it near midway to the equinox. Each month begins with the new moon, which is full on the 15th. Groundhog shadows aside, weather obeys no conceptual boundaries, so traditionally we get freezes here in northern New Mexico into May, sometimes even snow, with some toasty February days, too, with 50-degree (F) spreads night to noon. No longer deep winter, even in the passing freeze, we have indeed turned a corner in the annual orbit–something we can say on 2/2, as well as day 1/1 & 1/2…. ==================================================== [Post crypt: A recent book (on the debate between Burke & Paine) claimed the essence of conservatism was recognition of value in the established order, considering how much worse things could get without it, whereas the essence of radicalism (possibly he means progressivism) is the recognition of injustice & commitment to making things better. How varied & complex these forces can be in relation with each other may have been well illustrated by events following the so-called Arab spring. Applied to the calendar issue, a conservative might point to the chaos inevitable in any major changeover. (“You think Y2K was a challenge!”) A radical might point to how disconnected we seem to have grown from the natural forces that ultimately sustain us, even as our impact escalates at a potentially exponential (& unsustainable) rate. Being more in tune with the nature of time & the seasons might be more significant than realized, however we do it. In fact, the bulk of the difficulty is simply conceptual–e.g., in where we “think” the seasons are in our relations with heavenly bodies; the loss of connection between month names & sequence in the year. December is December, whatever its sequence & root-meaning. The same for January, which reminds me of friends named Jan, Jane, etc., as well as April, May & June. even July & August have their own panache. Meanwhile, we live with multiple calendars woven more or less seamlessly together in the cord of every year, the historical calendar (4th of July), folkloric (e.g., Halloween), cultural (thanksgiving), religious (Christmas, Yom Kippur), & honorific (Mother’s Day), with birthdays in each category. There are also astronomical, botanical, ecological calendars, etc., e.g., annual meteor showers, blooming times, and wildlife events, each with source, connections & dynamics rooted in a nature based fundamentally on cosmological-planetary relations. These natural cycles don’t stop with the earth year, of course, but scale up with longer term moon & sun rhythms, as reflected in some human calendars, like that used in classic Maya & Vedic astronomy, two of the most elegant…..