The Calendar Needs a Makeover

 

At the end of June a series of blue skies, tempering breezes, and long evenings made me think, “Why can’t we have more late spring?” Maybe we can! Let’s trash the old grade school mnemonic rhyme: “Thirty days has September, April, June, and November.” I have a better idea.

 

We should admit the calendar is screwed up and fix it. After all, climate change is real and it’s here. I’m probably asking for trouble with my next statement. Here goes: It’s been years since these parts (Western Massachusetts) have seen an old-fashioned New England winter.

 

Here's what used to happen. We got several light snows (2-3 inches) in early November just to toughen us up. By Thanksgiving, when darkness fell around 4:45 pm, bets were off for when the first Big One would hit. We’d start staring at the skies, look for halos around the moon, check in with the guy who plows the driveway, and make sure shovels and boots were at the ready. Roughly three of four Christmases were white, and count on cold and snowy Januarys and Februarys. With luck, a minor thaw around Groundhog Day brought brief respite. But as sure as the uncontrollable urge to read seed catalogs, a Nor’easter or two–known in the local parlance as “getting hammered”–buried anything shorter than the John Hancock building. Spring allegedly arrived in  March, but that was a mere strip tease. Actual spring might or might not begin to appear in early April–usually not. The first clue was a handful of snowdrops and crocuses peeking through an icy crust.

 

That was then. Now we often see no snow until Epiphany and the last several few years we’ve had very little at all. By mid-March most of the maple sap is done flowing and, if you wait until the end of the month, you’ll miss your sugar shack pancake breakfast. By early April, the lowlands are abloom. May and June have been hotter and wetter.

 

The Western world has used the Gregorian calendar since 1582. It was supposed to correct the vicissitudes of the older Julian calendar. Hah! No one counted upon human folly. For the record, lots of cultures don’t use the Gregorian calendar. Not that it matters as long as we agree that it takes 365 ¼ days for Spaceship Earth to circle the sun. There’s nothing magic about how many months we have or how many days are in each one. The sole bit of logic attached to twelve months with inconsistent allocations of days was an attempt to divide the year into roughly equal quarters based upon occurrences of the winter and summer solstices and the spring and fall equinoxes.

 

Big deal. The above logic has to be reversed in the Southern hemisphere, but they aren’t all that practical in the Northern hemisphere either. What do “official” designations matter if you live in Arizona or northern Maine? It’s pretty much the same year ‘round in warm climes, but ask someone in the northlands if cold weather holds off until December 21. On the other hand, the warmest months in New England tend to be July, August, and September, the latter an alleged “autumn” month.

 

You get the picture. So why not lop off a day off January and March and reassign them to the nicer months of April and June? I could be convinced to steal two more, say another from January and one from October to create a September 31 and June 32. Twenty-nine days in January and 28 in February would be plenty of winter! But I’ll be reasonable; it might be too difficult to reassign four days on short notice. But give me April and June 31 now, please.

 

After we adjust the calendar for my comfort we can proceed to tackle another big issue. Enjoying the light of long summer days? Me too. Let’s find the fools who decided to give us an extra hour of darkness beginning 2 am on November 3. Nobody needs more darkness unless they are a bear. I recommend hanging the inventors of Standard Time from a May Pole until they see the light of day.

 

Rob Weir