Well here it is December and that means Christmas. This year , even though, we are way down South it also means pretty cold. It is probably colder and messier up North but it still at least takes a jacket here. December is also the end of the old year and the beginning of the new.
It seems providential that Christmas with the promises that it implies happened at this time of year. The winter solstice and Mother Nature brings about a big change as she starts the Sun on its Northward journey. This is the big calendar change from one year to the next. One begins to wonder how many changes have come to the calendar? As religions and cultures change over the centuries ,calendars are adjusted to vary around the things that are important to those differences. That adds up to at least thirty-three different now. However, those can be categorized into three main groups.
The first is Solar. That is the one we mostly use in our civil works currently. The second is Lunar. That is fairly common in the older societies. And the last is a combination called Luni-Solar. This one is where the calendar designers use some formulas and other tricks to combine the differences between Solar and Lunar.
The simple fact is that for one to be sensible to us folks we have to do something to make things come out into something integers rather than fractions. Mother Nature doesn’t mind fractions near as much as we do. We have come to say that a year is 365 days except for Leap year. That fellow has some complex rules for when it happens. If you use a day as a 24 hour period the actual Mean Solar year is 365 days, five hours,48 minutes ,45.2 seconds.
We simplify that to add a leap day every 4 years. But things can get messed up because in decimal talk it is 365.242 days, not .25. So every 100 years or so we have to make another adjustment and skip a leap year. They skipped one in 1900 but didn’t in 2000.
Then when you change to lunar years it gets a little fuzzier. A lunar cycle or month is 29.53 days. When you put 12 of those together to make a standard year there are only 353 days. Using that figure a lunar year is 97% as long as a solar year. On that basis if you count from the same point instead of 2013 it would be 1953. I like that thought because I would be back in high school and have many less aches and pains.
But we have even more problems because the earth really rotates once every 23 hours 53 minutes and 4.1 seconds. It is just too fuzzy for me. I really believe that the world would be simpler if Mother Nature had made all those revolutions a little neater. We will just leave the detailed adjustments to the calendar guys.
