Published: January 10, 2008 11:56 am         

Our calendar can be fickle, but always interesting

By now, a week and a half into the new year, most of us are beginning to feel comfortable writing 2008 on assorted documents.

We have transferred important dates - birthdays, routine doctors' appointments, and regularly scheduled meetings to the new calendars, and have noted that 2008 will not only be a Leap Year, but will have the earliest date for Easter since 1913.

Over the ages there have been some major adjustments to the calendar, attempting to reconcile a solar year of 365-and-a-fraction days with a 28-day lunar month, a calendar of 12 months, and a biblically prescribed seven-day work week.

We've twiddled the dates for national holidays, to provide four-day weekends (and complicate trash collections) but the sequence of weekdays and months and the names we use to distinguish them are little changed from the time of the Roman Empire.

The Roman year, however, began in March, not January. In the northern hemisphere that is the time of the reawakening of vegetation, a fresh start for most living things. The month took its name from Mars, the warrior god, and we still associate it with wild winds and rough weather as the winter loosens its hold.

When March was the first month, September, October, November, and December made sense: Months numbering 7, 8, 9 and 10. What we call July and August also carried numeral names, but after Julius Caesar was assassinated in the Forum, Marc Anthony (for whom Shakespeare wrote the famous speech, "Friends, Romans, Countrymen...) suggested honoring him by giving his name to the month in which he had been born.

When Augustus, Caesar's great nephew, became the first Roman emperor, he considered himself at least his uncle's equal, and not only grabbed the next month for himself, but stole a day from September to give him equal honors with Uncle Julius. incidentally, he also upset the neat plan of alternating months of 30 and 31 days.

Scholars are not sure how June got its name. Some of them think it honored Juno, queen of the Roman pantheon. Others suggest that because it followed May, which honored maiores, or older men, June was dedicated to young men - juniors.

There are some who see an association with the word JUNGO, or unison, perhaps because it was the time when the ancient Roman and Sabine tribes got together and their new king reformed the calendar. The joining, of course, could just as easily have referred to marriages, for which the month was famous, then as now. Take your pick!

January, now the first month of the year, takes its name from a minor Roman divinity who was in charge of opening everything from doors (hence our word janitor) to elaborate ceremonies.

Janus had two heads, so that he could look forward and backward at the same time. Special prayers were addressed to him at the beginning of every month, and even we, who have given up any idea of Janus as a god, seem to feel there is something very special about the first day of each new year.

In spite of being a cold month, February takes its name - burning - from ancient purification ceremonies that involved fire.

April comes from a word meaning "opening'' - the time of year when buds begin to burst into bloom. The sound of the word is as pleasant as the season we associate with it.

Although our months carry the names and traditions from ancient Rome, the days of our week, with the exception of Saturday, are tied to Norse legends.

Sunday and Monday honor the sun and the moon. Tuesday commemorates Tiw, the Nordic equivalent of Mars, god of war. Wednesday is Wodin's Day; he was the supreme being in Nordic mythology, like Jove or Zeus in the classical panetheon. Thor, god of thunder, and Freye, symbol of love and beauty, give us Thursday and Friday, respectively.

Then, rather oddly, we tack on Saturday, named for a Roman god of agriculture, who was credited with having ruled during the Golden Age, but remembered in the riotous celebrations of the Roman Saturnalia.

Over the centuries, all sorts of suggestions for improving the western calendar have been offered. The French Revolution tried to introduce different names for the months. Early in the 20th century a suggestion was made that all months should begin on Sunday (giving us a Friday the thirteenth every month!) and ending the year with a variable sort of leap-month that would bring us back to Sunday, Jan. 1. To some people it sounded good - but the idea did not catch on.

We have accepted the idea of moving Memorial Day to a Monday, ensuring a four-day weekend at the end of May, and we observe Presidents' Day rather than the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln, as we knew them in our youth.

But we continue to celebrate Christmas on Dec. 25, no matter when it falls in the week, and to observe Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November.

Our calendar is an odd mixture of tradition and accommodation to change. At times it is fickle, and at other times seems to be set in stone. But it is always interesting.

Betty VanNewkirk is the historian for the Frostburg Museum.