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Today in history, kind of, the British Empire adopted the Gregorian Calendar. The year was 1752, and it involved skipping eleven days, jumping from September 2 to September 14. Can we do something like that and just skip the rest of this entire fucking year?
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: September 14, 1752--
Fucking calendars, man. Like, why is OCTOber not the eighth month? And how come DECember isn’t the tenth month? I hope whoever was responsible for that bullshit got fucking stabbed. Old joke, I know. It took a while for most people to get with the program, which is why the Soviet Union’s glorious October Revolution actually happened in November 1917.
Traditional vs. modern. Out with the old style and in with the new. Style. Except new style wasn’t all that new. It first came about, and was named for, via a papal bull decreed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 because Earth’s rotation vs. its revolution ain’t all that exact. A day on Earth is 23 hours, 59 minutes, and 59.999 something something seconds. Close enough to 24. But a year isn’t 365 days, which is why we have leap years. But a leap year isn’t good enough, because a year isn’t exactly 365.25 days either. It’s 365.2422 days, and Julius Caesar and his Julian Calendar didn’t fucking know that.
So the Catholic Church said hey everyone we’re changing the dates on shit and Catholic countries got on board but the mostly Protestant countries said that’s nice fuck you very much and stuck with the old way for another century or so. Many Protestants saw the new calendar as a Catholic plot to bring them back into the fold or some shit. And then people were celebrating Easter at different times and there was fighting about Zombie Jesus is on this day and others were fuck you Zombie Jesus is THIS day.
Anyway, the Nordic countries are often good at figuring shit out like healthcare and taxing the rich, so they eventually got on board at the beginning of the 18th century. Just because the Catholic Church said to do it didn’t make it a shitty idea; after a couple thousand years shit was getting out of whack and an adjustment was needed. Speaking of calendar fuckery and being out of whack, in the early 18th century Sweden had a calendar that was a day ahead of the Julian and to correct for it in 1712 they decided to have a February 30th that year. They finally got on board with the Gregorian in 1753.
The Brits finally adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1752 and did the 12-day jump forward, but the Act proclaiming it made no mention of Pope Gregory because fuck that Catholic bullshit. Anyway, they enforced it in their colonies too and that caused it to snowball in the rest of the world and here we are having Christmas four days after the solstice just like Jesus wanted.
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Just imagine how much simpler our lives would have been if they'd set up 13 months instead of only 12. With a 13-month year, each month having exactly 28 days leaves only 1 day left over at the end of the year -- 2 days in leap years -- to party immensely before the cycle starts all over again. That 1 day (Leap Year 2 days) would have to be Monday-Sunday. It could just be the international Holiday Celebration Day. We could have set it up so January 1 is exactly the same day every fucking year instead of having 28, 30, 31 days per month and the day numbers changing every fucking year with holidays .... whenever. Think about it. I'd love if you thought about it a lot then wrote a column about it. Ask Neil deGrasse Tyson what he thinks.