A Brand New Day, Part 2

Finding the Time

                Monday through Friday is for working. Saturday is for working too, for some. For others it is a day to catch up on errands inside and outside the house. Sunday is for working, catching up on errands and/or getting up at nearly the same time as the work week to go worship. Some churches take all day with their fellowship meetings and evening services.

                And let’s not forget Saturday night worship is not just for Hebrews and Catholics anymore. Some churches – even Protestant churches – have Saturday night services, and Friday services.  Wednesday services are traditional, but there’s another evening spending time worshipping when I need to be vacuuming the basement rug!

                That’s not to poo-poo those who feel the need for worship outweighs the need to vacuum. “My God is more important to me than my rugs!” I can respect that. I will never take off my shoes in your house, but I can respect that. But you see my point about the lack of time.  Remember this day is for rest, recuperation, relaxation and reflection.

                Where do we put this new day? I suggest between Saturday and Sunday.  This way we won’t break up anyone’s work week. Saturday can be used to prepare ourselves for the new day – get all the shopping done, fill up the gas tank, etc. So the next day can be totally about rest, recuperation, relaxation and reflection.  Then back up early for Sunday.

                This would give us eight days in a week. Beatles homage aside, how will that affect our calendar?  Stay with me on this as I crunch the numbers.

                Eight days will get us 45 weeks with 5 days left over. This does not count what we not call leap year – when we would have 6 days left over. This would give us 3 months with 3 weeks and 9 months with 4 weeks.

                This is assuming we do not do away with 12-month years. I have no preference there – I’ll let whatever conference or committee in charge of this new calendar make that decision.

                What about the extra five days?  Those can be free days attached to the calendar. We can have one day for a seasonal celebration – going back to our pagan roots here.  A spring vacation day (we can still call it Easter), a summer (we can use that for July 4^th – we can still observe the specific day too), autumn (where we can place Halloween – it has long since lost any vestige of its being on a specific date), or Fall Festival or whatever the scaredy-cats decide to call it) and winter (which we can set for Christmas or whatever you want to call it – a rant for another day -- “I’ll start saying Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays when you start calling it Halloween instead of Fall Festival”).

                The fifth day can be used for a New Year’s celebration. These won’t be days of rest as proposed – if businesses, theaters, restaurants, etc. want to be open those days that is their decision.  It won’t affect the proposed eighth day.

               

                Not that it hasn’t been done before.  In 1582 some of the world switched to the Gregorian calendar from the Julian calendar. This reduced the calendar by 10 minutes; and the Gregorian calendar adds three more days every four centuries.

                This is why your Orthodox friends show up on January 7^th for Christmas dinner. After 400+ years, some of the Julian calendar dates are still being observed.

                There are 365.2425 days in a year. Adding a day to the calendar will result in a 0.65+ overage. This means that every third year we will have to add two days to the calendar. Sort of a leap-year plus. We can add these days to two of the three months that only have three weeks in them. And then every one hundred years we’ll have to subtract four days to keep the calendar in balance – otherwise eventually December will be a summer month. Perhaps we can subtract a day in each year ending in 25. Or we can add one other day every 30 years then yet another day every 100 years. There – 365.2425. Simple, no? (Rhetorical…)

                It makes as much sense as what we have now – 2000 was a leap year, but 1900 was not! Did you know that? 

                This whole thing is a math nerd’s wet dream, I grant you, but the point is – it’s been done before, we can do it again! As said in Part 1, it might not be in our lifetime, but we can get in this extra day!

Next: What will we call our new day?