For Runeberg’s Day (and Curtis)

Except for my friend Liz, who pre-mails food supplies to her vacation address and packs a clam rake in her luggage, I’m the most organized person I know. I make lists; I plot my garden on graph paper (though another gardening friend once told me this was very geeky); I group errands together so that they make sense logistically.

Like most organized people, I like structure. When I changed jobs from marketing research, where what you do depends on what the marketing people ask you to do, to marketing, it was very difficult at first. I had to make up my own job, my own structure. Once I got used to it, though, I realized I could never go back. It was good for me.

The book I called Celebrating Time, on which the first year of this blog was based, was very structured. What I wrote each day was determined by what people in the past had celebrated on that day, what saint’s day or season it was, or by the astrological sign of that day. The structure told me what to write.

This year, I’m trying something different. There is essentially no structure, except that of writing every day. Sometimes I’ll regress, sticking in a composer’s birthday or an interesting person’s death, but mostly I’m winging it. Just like a marketing job.

It’s good for me.

But I felt a bit wistful when I read Curtis’s comment the other day. “What happened to Candlemas and Punxatawny Phil?” he wrote. So here, for Curtis (and my former self), is a sweet little tart for Runeberg’s Day.

Those stacks of calendar pages just don’t quite line up

For some reason I thought that when Pope Gregory fixed the calendar in 1582, everybody but England went along.

Not true (and by the way, this is my last fixing-of-the-calendar entry, so just tune out if this is too boring. And why it fascinates me so, I’ll never quite understand. But for historians, all those dates and non-dates between 1582 and 1923, when Greece finally succumbed, must be a nightmare.).

For Spain, Portugal, Poland, Lithuania, and most of Italy (some of Italy resisted the Pope, of all things), today was October 15, 1582, instead of October 5 (thereby fixing Easter back to the all-important formula of the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon, which is usually but not always the astronomical full moon, on or after March 21st). (Why Easter was so important, as opposed to Christmas, for example, we’ll never know.)

Now, there were a whole bunch of countries that, understandably, couldn’t understand why a pope should be messing around with their calendars, and the longer they took to get back in sync the more days they had to get rid of. So it took Denmark, for example, until 1700 to obliterate all of February after the 18th. In Russia, they decided there was so much going on in 1918 they might as well do away with some of that year, so February didn’t start till Valentine’s Day.

But Swedish historians must really tear their hair out. Sweden decided to make the change gradually, by eliminating all the leap days between 1700 and 1740, when, theoretically, they’d be caught up; but in 1704 and 1708 they forgot, so whatever historical events happened in Sweden on February 29 in those years really did happen. King Charles XII, in his wisdom, decided to fix this problem by adding February 30 to the year 1712, and somehow they limped along till 1753, when they finally did away with February after the 17th.

Got all that?

Now I’ll go back to celebrating time, still seeing the days as little stacks of calendar pages, using the faulty premise that a date is a date is a date.

09 09 09

If you go to Bing, you find out that it equals 0.111111, that Facebook wants 999,999 members by today, something about bowel incontinence, and something about romance after 60. If you go to Google, you can find out why 09/09/09 is special, what it means (for example, that it’s the upside-down 666, those scary devil numbers), and how to get ready.

I’m not really interested in Facebook’s marketing strategy or the other two things. After 12/12/12, there are no more repeating dates till 2101 – and I’m not going to be around by then.

So Bing, you have only three more years to prove yourself. But I understand the world is supposed to end in 2012 anyway – could you explain that to us?

Patriots’ Day

It’s okay that the dates of Easter and Passover float around, since nobody knows when (or if) they really happened. But although three-day weekends are great, it just doesn’t seem right to me that Martin Luther King Jr. and George Washington always have to be born on a Monday; and that the Battles of Lexington and Concord, fought after the switch to the Gregorian calendar (so they really did happen on April 19), now get celebrated (albeit with the exciting Boston Marathon, which people probably need a weekend to get ready for) on a different day.

But we should all look up to Massachusetts – after all, they’ve led the way on marriage equality and universal health care. So I say they deserve their own holiday, even though they moved it to a Monday.

Old Lady Day

On this day in England they don’t give up their seats to wizened ladies with blue hair, but they do begin a new tax year.

On April 6??

It all goes back to the switch from “Annunciation style” to “Circumcision style,” believe it or not (also known less biologically as “old style” and “new style”). For centuries, the British year began on March 25, or “Lady Day,” when Jesus was theoretically conceived. In 1752 the Gregorian calendar changed New Year’s Day to January 1, when he was theoretically circumcised, and added 11 days to catch up to the solar year (in 1800, because of leap year complications, they had to add one more).

This was all quite confusing for tax collecting as well as calendar makers, as one might imagine. To keep the tax year a year long, they had to add 11 days to Lady Day, and one more in 1800. “Old Lady Day,” then, is the old March 25.

It makes one wonder how the British tax collectors feel about abortion.

Aprilis

How did April get its name? Well, maybe it’s as simple as aperire, the Latin word for “to open.” Not as evocative as those februa thongs, but there is a lot of opening going on these days, midst all the rain.

Or maybe it’s like six degrees of separation (really only four): maybe Aprilis was originally Aphrilis, which comes from Aphrodite, who is the Greek counterpart of the Roman Venus, to whom the month of April was sacred. But why would the Romans, who so carefully changed all those deities’ names, and after all named March for Mars, not Ares, suddenly switch to Greek for April (and May, for that matter)?

Who knows. But this month-name derivation thing will get a lot easier (but more boring) once we get to September.