Our calendar is weird.
Some months have 30 days. Others have 31. One usually has just 28. You knew that, and since you’ve lived with it all your life, you probably never really stopped to think just how weird the Gregorian calendar is. (It used to be worse.)But wait! There’s more!
The first day of each season isn’t always on the same date each year. Sure, it’s always one of two possible days, but still…. A week is always 7 days long, but it doesn’t always start on a Sunday (or Monday, if you prefer to call Sunday part of the weekend).
The word month apparently comes from “moon”, but the months don’t follow the lunar cycle. Though we’ll soon see that this bit isn’t all that important calendar-wise.
How did we get into this mess?
I’ve read quite a bit about the history of the calendar. It’s been a messy subject pretty much forever. The good news is that we finally figured out (closely enough) how long a year (a solar cycle) is. So our calendar is doing a decent job of keeping things in order, even though it’s still a mess internally.
I am of the opinion that we should clean things up. I am far from the first to be of this opinion. Others have tried and failed to make the calendar neater. I don’t expect to have any more success, but then again, who knows?
So, what changes could we and should we make? Let’s first start at the beginning and see what God says about some of the main parts of Creation that we use to guide us in keeping track of these things.
God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to divide the day from the night, and let them serve as markers to indicate seasons, days, and years. Let them serve as lights in the expanse of the sky to give light to the earth,” and it was so. (Genesis 1:14-15, EHV)
The original purpose of the sun and, more to the point, the moon was not to indicate months. They are there for seasons, days, and years (and to divide day from night).
What is a day? Whether you start a day at sunrise, sunset, noon, or midnight, it is the period of time we have divided into 24 hours. So it’s when the sun has moved from a given point until it reaches that same point 24 hours later. That’s almost circular reasoning (no pun intended), but I think it’s the cleanest explanation I can give and that we need for our purposes here.
What is a season? Seasons start when the sun is as far north as it ever goes, when it’s over the equator (twice), and when it’s as far south as it ever goes.
What is a year? A year is complete when the sun returns to the north-south point from which it started a little over 365 days earlier. Since this actually takes about 365 ¼ days, we add a day to our calendar every 4 years, most of the time. We’ve figured out that it isn’t exactly 365.25 years, so we make other adjustment as we go, so that the seasons don’t shift little by little over the years.
And that was the problem many years ago. The calendar people used didn’t have the correct number of days in it. It was too short. So, from one year to the next, we kept getting to the next season too soon.
Even today, we know that, for all the leap year adjustments we make, eventually the calendar will be off by as much as a day. Some folks are really upset by this. I’m not. When it comes to that time, we just add (or subtract as the case may be) a day, and we’ll be good for another few millennia. Problem solved.
It’s what we are putting up with now from day to day, week to week, month to month, season to season, and year to year that I’m more concerned with. Not worried concerned, just topic-for-consideration concerned.
So, here is my proposal.
Start each year on the first day of Spring*, which is usually March 20 in the Gregorian system. Some years it’s March 19, but that doesn’t matter and shouldn’t affect the new calendar. This allows Autumn to start in September (in both systems) nearly on the same date. Similarly, Summer and Winter will start on a fixed date every year.
Make each month exactly 28 days - 4 weeks of 7 days each - for a total of 364 days in a 13-month year. Making each month the same length makes planning much easier in many sectors.
This does require one extra day each year to make a total of 365. In a Leap Year, it requires 2 extra days. Neither of these days will be attached to any month. The Leap Year schedule follows the same plan as in the Gregorian system as it is close enough to last for many centuries.
So the length of the year is not changing (and we don’t want or need it to), as it has in times past. It’s just being organized in a new way. This is not the first time this arrangement was suggested. Obviously, in the past a 12-month system has usually won out. That said, sometimes a thirteenth month was temporarily added (intercalated is the technical term) to prevent the seasonal drift I mentioned earlier.
Thirteen is not an “unlucky” number. There is no such thing as luck or being lucky or unlucky. Each month will now have a Friday the 13th, and there will be 13 months. This should not be a problem for those who are not superstitious.
This new calendar does not make a month equal to a lunar cycle, but the Gregorian doesn’t either. The important points are that the seasons do not drift over time and that holidays still seem reasonably assigned their given dates.
What about those holidays? Let me first tackle Easter.
Why in the world do we still allow Easter to float around from year to year? Theologians admit we don’t know when that first Easter (Jesus’ resurrection) occurred. We don’t know when he was born either, but we don’t let Christmas wander away from December 25! So in this new calendar, Easter is on a fixed date too. I chose one that is about in the middle between the earliest and the latest it is allowed to occur in our present system.
Virtually all the other holidays can stay just where they are. Because the months are now 28 days long, the holidays will always fall on the same day of the week from year to year - as will the start of each season.
The one problem holiday (and it’s barely a holiday) I could think of was April Fools Day. In the new calendar, most of the months get new names, and April isn’t one of them. So if you insist on keeping April Fools Day, I suggest moving it to the 365th day of the year - Free Day, as I currently call it. In a Leap Year, we have Free Day and Free Day 2 - both of which would be national holidays.
What about the month names? September, October, November, and December should be the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months based on the first part of their names. Therefore, I suggest keeping those four names, possibly changing the 8th month slightly to Octember.
For the other months, I suggest the following. I really like the names for the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 13th months. The 11th and 12th are pretty good. I could be talked out of the suggestions for the 2nd and 3rd quite easily.
- Firstember
- Secondember (Nextember?)
- Thirdember (Treember or Trember?)
- Quatrember (Quartember?)
- Quintember
- Sextember
- September
- Octember (October?)
- November
- December
- Elevember
- Twelvember
- Lastember
Does this new calendar system need a new name? If you think it does, please don’t name it after me. I really don’t know what to call it. Maybe something like the 2813 Calendar, as in 28 days and 13 months…?
Here is what each month looks like, starting with the first day of Spring in 2023 of the Gregorian system. I’ve added Gregorian reference points along the way to help you keep your head on your shoulders.
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