Odd O'blography

Solstice Reflections update

Last month I posted some thoughts about the calendar: "Solstice Reflections" .

I described a perpetual calendar with 13 months of 28 days and a Solstice Day holiday to make a full 365-day year. Every fourth year would have a second Solstice Day holiday to account for our current leap year. The primary objection to such a calendar comes from the religious communities who are committed to a seven-day cycle of the Sabbath.

Last week a friend sent a link to a post about early efforts to adopt such a calendar:

https://www.ranker.com/list/strange-history-international-fixed-calendar/stephan...

What caught my eye was a comment to the effect that weeks have meaning, but months are wholly arbitrary. That set me to thinking outside the box again. Why not make a calendar with 52 weeks and no months at all? We could coordinate the new year with the winter solstice* and simply count up 52 weeks to the next New Year's Eve.

Of course, we'd still have to account for an 'extra' quarter day every year to keep our new calendar in sync with the solar year. But instead of a leap day every four years, we could add a leap week every 28 years. Most people would see only two or three leap weeks in a lifetime. This would maintain the seven-day cycle of the Sabbath and eliminate any serious objection to calendar reform.

You may wonder about being almost a week out of sync with the solar calendar after 27 years. Is that a problem? Well, if we intentionally start day one of the new calendar three and a half days after the winter solstice, then we'd fall back into sync fourteen years later. And we'd be 3 and a half days ahead of the winter solstice when leap week begins. So, our new calendar would never be more than three and a half days out of sync with the solar year. That seems close enough for planting and harvesting crops. Global warming has already impacted growing seasons by several days in many regions of the world.

Of course, using the winter solstice is not required. It's convenient, measurable, and near January 1^st, but we could choose differently. Depending on your local culture, New Year's Day is observed in February, March, September, or October. Another possibility is to start the new year with the spring equinox when the green of new life appears. Personally, I could support using either the turn of the solar year at the winter solstice or the return of new growth at the spring equinox.

Using weeks would seem weird at first, but many cultures around the world use different calendars. They have no difficulty coping and we'd adjust more easily than you might think. Would we miss our months that have been in use for thousands of years? Of course, we would. But instead of months, we could name the weeks. Wouldn't it be fun to have 53 named weeks instead of a paltry 12 months?



*Note: This is written from the viewpoint of the northern hemisphere. A significant number of people experience the seasons in reverse of my cultural bias.