Solstice Day

Solstice Day

“Gee Grandad, what’s this thing?” Jonny asked. They’d been sent to the attic to find lights for the Solstice Day celebration.

“That, my boy, is a clock. A genuine Schoolhouse Regulator with chimes. Your Grandma always loved that clock. It reminded her of her grandmother, but it’s not very useful anymore.”

“Does it work? There’s no display for the time numbers.”

“Well, the numbers are painted on the dial, and the hands tell the time.”

“Hands? You mean these pointer things?”

“That’s exactly right, the little hand points to the hour and the big hand points to the minute. A wind-up spring inside the clock makes the hands move around the dial.”

“But where are the numbers? All I see are letters, just ‘X’s and ‘I’s”

“Oh, that’s right, they don’t teach you kids about Roman numerals anymore. Okay, I’ll try to explain it so you can understand. The ‘I’ stands for one and the X stands for ten. So, at the top of the dial the ‘XII’ means ten plus two. It stands for twelve. To the right of the twelve is a single ‘I’. It stands for one. The hours count up as you go around the dial, from one to twelve. And see, the minutes are marked out by the little marks between the hours. If you count them, you'll see that there are sixty minutes for each hour.”

Jonny looked at the clock face curiously, trying to understand this strange way of counting.

"One, two, three, four . . . wait, ‘V’ must be five, right?”

“Smart lad. I almost forgot about ‘V’.

“. . . ten, eleven, twelve. I don’t understand,” Jonny said, looking confused. “Why twelve? Why sixty? That doesn’t make any sense. Days are 20 hours long and hours have 100 minutes.”

“Yes, that's right, but days used to be 24 hours when I was your age. And hours were 60 minutes long. The big hand would go around the dial every hour, and the little hand would go around the dial twice every day.”

“That sounds complicated, how did you know what time it really was?”

“We just knew,” chuckled Grandad. “Time doesn’t really change, Jonny, people just measure it differently now. And it wasn’t really so complicated. The minutes were a little longer back then and the hours were a little shorter, but a day went from midnight to midnight, just like now.”

Jonny looked doubtful, still not understanding what Grandad meant. He’d been born after the metric calendar reformation of 2054. The political turmoil of the Terrible Teens had given rise to the Rationalist Movement, and that movement led to a new age of scientific progress. The pendulum of progress swung so far over toward sanity that America had finally embraced the logic of the metric system. And then they had gone even further by spearheading the use of a new, more rational timekeeping system and yearly calendar.

The time of day had been rationalized to have 100 seconds per minute, 100 minutes per hour, and 10 hours each of am and pm. The new second was defined as .432 old seconds, so a new minute was equal to 43.2 old seconds, a new hour was 1.2 old hours, and 20 new hours with 200,000 new seconds made a day the exact same length as 24 hours with 86,400 old seconds (200,000 x .432 = 86,400).

"Does the clock still work?" Jonny asked.

"I think so. Let's wind it up and see."

Grandad opened the glass door that provided access to the pendulum and felt around.

"Ah, here we go," he said, holding up a silver-colored metal key. "We use this key to wind the springs. There's one spring for the clock mechanism and another for the chimes. If you don't like the chimes, then you don't wind that spring."

Jonny watched with fascination as Grandad opened the glass cover on the clock face and inserted the key into a small hole. There was a ratcheting noise as he turned the key several times.

"We don't need to wind it very much," Grandad said. "This is enough for a test run."

"Let's try the chimes, too," he added, moving the key to a second hole and repeating the process.

"Now we'll just give the pendulum a little push."

"It works!" Jonny smiled with delight as the pendulum began to swing and the clock made a ticking noise. The pendulum soon steadied into a rhythmic beat, and they watched it together for a minute, united in a common fascination.

"The pendulum counts out the seconds, Jonny" Grandad explained. "Each tick-tock is one second. The minute hand advances by one mark every 60 seconds, and the hour hand advances one hour each time the minute hand goes all the way around."

"But the pendulum is too slow," Jonny frowned. "Seconds should go one, two three."

"Like I said earlier, Jonny, old seconds were longer than new seconds. We used to count them out by saying one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three." Grandad counted in sync with the ticks and tocks to demonstrate.

"Oh, I think I understand it now," Jonny said brightly. "If new seconds are shorter, but we have more of them, then the day works out the same!"

"You're a chip off the old block," Grandad beamed proudly. "If everyone learned as quickly as you, the world would be a better place. And it wouldn't have taken so long to improve the calendar."

The general public had been unwilling to give up their seven-day week, but they did let go of superstition and convert to a calendar with 13 months of 28 days. This allowed every month to begin on a Monday with only one day of the year unaccounted for (13 x 28 = 364). The final piece of the puzzle was to designate the summer solstice as a special holiday not included in any month. The lure of a new day off overrode the objections of calendar companies who feared the impact of a perpetually reusable calendar. And, if one day off is good, then two is even better! Every fourth year would add a second holiday at the winter solstice to correspond to the leap year of the old calendar.

The existing month names were preserved for sentimental reasons and a new month of Kamala was added to follow the summer Solstice Day. It was named in honor of Kamala Harris, the first woman to serve as U.S. President. She’d served out the final months of the beloved Joe Biden’s term and then served two terms of her own. Her calm, but firm leadership had been the catalyst for the larger rationalist movement.

Summer Solstice was soon established as a relaxed time to gather with friends and family and celebrate the return of warm weather. However, the idea that it didn’t count as part of the calendar gradually came to mean an escape from responsibility and accountability. Virtually no one worked on their yearly ‘free day’. The quiet barbeques gave way to wild parties with wild behavior. It became generally expected that people would dress in costume and indulge their deepest, darkest fantasies. Cheating on your diet, or your spouse, didn’t count on Solstice Day.

Winter Solstice, in contrast, became a non-denominational religious holiday. A day when all faiths, from Wiccans to Muslims to Roman Catholics, could celebrate together. It might happen only once every four years, but at least it was a start. For many it was a day of reflection, and reconciliation. For others it was an extra day to prepare for the holiday season. For nine-year old Jonny it would be the beginning of the biggest, grandest Christmas display he’d ever seen.

“Here we go,” Grandad said at last. “This whole stack is for Winter Solstice. Let’s start getting them downstairs.”

Jonny quickly forgot about the odd, antique clock and grabbed a box. Time to decorate!

“Come on, Grandad," he called enthusiastically. "This is gonna be great!”





Author's Note: ▼

Written for:   "The Whatever Contest -- Closed for Now" 

Prompt:   Create a different holiday to be celebrated in December. Explain the purpose, traditions, etc.


The calendar I describe in my story was actually proposed by The League of Nations in 1923. They called it the International Fixed Calendar (IFC) and it would have had 13 months with 28 days each. The only difference from my story is that the 'extra' day would have been inserted between December 31 and January 1st. I knew that this idea wasn't original with me, but I didn't hear about the IFC until three years after I wrote Solstice Day.

The opposition to the IFC came primarily from the Jewish community. They hold the seven-day cycle as sacred law and objected to a 'nothing' day that would shift their Sabbath by one day every year. The traditional Hebrew calendar inserts an entire month every four years to align with the solar calendar, but it always maintains the sabbath on Saturday

Word Count: 944