Calendars without Underpants

 

    Happy New Year to all Y’all. My interest in calendars began as an early teen in Deadwood, South Dakota, when my Dad brought home a huge boxful of old calendars given to him by an itinerant calendar salesman. In those days, pictures on calendars were about the only visual art hanging in working class homes. Most folks’ houses sported a knickknack shelf containing a salt and pepper shaker collection, or twenty ceramic hunting dogs, or what remained of the Ironstone china after the grandfolks bounced it across the prairies, but very few contained framed artwork. The images on calendars were all we knew of the Old Masters.

   I lugged the box upstairs to my bedroom and began my arts education session. About fifteen deep, below the Golden Retriever puppies and Autumn in New England and Poppies in Flanders Fields and Two Cowpokes Leaning on the Fence Rail and Scenic Lake Louise and The Resurrection and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, I found a picture that changed my appreciation of art forever.

    It was that glorious photograph of Marilyn Monroe, nude, on a background of red velvet curtain-like material, lying with one leg crossed over the other, left arm cocked above her head, smiling, almost blushing it seemed, with breasts fully exposed, nipples pointing toward the upper left corner of the frame. For the next few years, I and some of my most privileged friends studied that calendar daily. Years later, when it was revealed that both Jack and Bobby Kennedy had “affairs” with Marilyn, I felt a little closer to the rich boys running the American government, knowing that they, too, had probably been calendar aficionados.  So, in honor of Marilyn, who, had she not overdosed on fame, would’ve turned 100 on the first of June, 2024, and of calendar nerds everywhere, I’ve collected the following useless facts for your study.

      Most early calendars were of the lunar type, based on the time interval from one new moon to the next, a lunation. The ancient Egyptians used a calendar with 12 months of 30 days each, for a total of 360 days per year. About 4000 B.C. they added five extra days at the end of every year to bring it more into line with the solar year. These five days became a festival because it was thought to be unlucky to work during that time. I agree with the Egyptians. 

       Eventually, the smart folks calculated that the solar year was closer to 3651/4 days, but instead of having a single leap day every four years they let the one-quarter day accumulate. After 1,460 solar years, 1,461 Egyptian years had passed. This means that as the years passed, the Egyptian months fell out of sync with the seasons, so that the summer months eventually fell during winter. Only once every 1,460 years did their calendar year coincide precisely with the solar year.

     Other folks had other ideas. The lunar calendar that best approximated a solar-year calendar was based on a 19-year period, with 7 of these 19 years having 13 months. In all, the period contained 235 months. Still using the lunation value of 29 and 1/2 days, this made a total of 6,932.5 days, while 19 solar years added up to 6,939.7 days, a difference of five weeks per century.

    The 19-year period required adjustment, but it became the basis of the calendars of the ancient Chinese, Babylonians, Greeks, and Jews. This same calendar was also used by the Arabs initially, but Muhammad later forbade shifting from 12 months to 13 months, so that the Islamic calendar now has a lunar year of about 354 days. As a result, the months of the Islamic calendar, as well as the Islamic religious festivals, migrate through all the seasons of the solar year.

     When Rome emerged as a world power, they complicated things even more because of a superstition that even numbers were unlucky. Hence their months were 29 or 31 days long, with the exception of February, which had 28 days. However, four months of 31 days, seven months of 29 days, and one month of 28 days added up to only 355 days. Therefore the Romans invented an extra month called Mercedonius of 22 or 23 days. It was added every second year. This, too, was party time. 

     The Roman calendar eventually go so far off that Julius Caesar, advised by the astronomer Sosigenes, ordered a sweeping reform and the year 46 B.C. was made 445 days long by imperial decree, bringing the calendar back in step with the seasons. Then the solar year (with the value of 365 days and 6 hours) was made the basis of the calendar. The months were 30 or 31 days in length, and to take care of the 6 hours, every fourth year was made a 366-day year. Moreover, Caesar decreed the year began with the first of January, not with the vernal equinox in late March. This system continues to be used by Eastern Orthodox churches for holiday calculations to this day. However, despite the correction, the Julian calendar is still 11 and 1/2 minutes longer than the actual solar year, and after a number of centuries, even 11and 1/2 minutes adds up.

     By the 15th century the Julian calendar had drifted behind the solar calendar by about a week, so the vernal equinox was falling around March 12 instead of around March 20. Pope Sixtus IV, who reigned from 1471 to 1484, decided that another reform was needed and called the German astronomer Regiomontanus to Rome to advise him. Regiomontanus arrived in 1475, and died three days afterward.

     Things were delayed until 1545, when the Council of Trent authorized Pope Paul III to reform the calendar once more. Most of the Pope’s mathematical calculations were done by Father Christopher Clavius. The immediate correction, advised by Father Clavius was that Thursday, Oct. 4, 1582, was to be the last day of the Julian calendar. The next day would be Friday, Oct. 15. Thus, according to the Gregorian calendar, it is impossible to have been born on this planet between Oct 4 and Oct 15, 1582.

     The Gregorian reform was not adopted right away. Most Catholic countries quickly changed to the pope's new calendar in 1582. Europe's Protestant princes chose to ignore the papists and continued with the Julian calendar until 1700 when Germany and the Netherlands changed to the new calendar. In Great Britain (and its colonies) the shift did not take place until 1752, and in Russia not until 1918. In Turkey, the Islamic calendar was used until 1926. Luckily for me and the other boys on the block, the Gregorian calendar was firmly in place in South Dakota by 1955. It was only recently that I figured out that my Dad probably knew that the picture of Marilyn was in the calendar stack.