Did you celebrate Valentine’s Day? It is arguably the most important day of this month. That is, of course, unless it happens that your birthstone is an Amethyst. Of those born in February some small percent are denied a birthday every four years. So, for those less than one percenters you had your day last year.
Why is February so short a month you might ask. It probably goes back to those pesky Romans. For a long time they didn’t think the winter months really should be counted and so they didn’t. Then they had trouble deciding whether it should be the last of the year or not. Some of us still think the year should start in the spring and end in the winter. However, the Calendar Gods have split the seasons up spring starts near the end of March.
Heavens even the Groundhogs of the world know that as of February second there are probably six weeks left in the winter. There is one good thing about February. It lasts exactly four weeks. So the first of March is on the same day as The first of February. That is except for that Pesky extra day every four years.
I guess we ought to blame Mother Nature for the way our calendars are more or less haphazard. First the year is nominally 365 days. Now we have decided to break it up into 12 months so it can’t come out even. Then the actual length is something like 365.25and change long. So we have to add a day approximately every four years and then do something with the change at some time.
Some folks propose making the year 13 months of 28 days each. That leaves at least one extra day each year plus an extra day to cover the fractional time Mother Nature gives us to work with. The best way to deal with that is make those days Holidays.
The length of the day is not exactly a 24 four timespan as it is slightly variable. In these precision times we now slip in those leap seconds. They could come to make our Holidays a little longer. Those people who made the butter commercial claimed that is was “not nice to fool with Mother Nature” Well , for sure, it is messy to try and make her nice and neat like we try to do with our yards and homes and cars and things like that.
It seems like the world is just getting a little messier as time goes by. As one who reads history I am convinced that the world is a little more civilized than it was hundreds of years ago. But because we move faster, and a little more furiously, we get into a mess a little quicker. We argue a little more about things that we probably won’t ever agree on. It just may be that we should go back to messing with Mother Nature and our calendar.
