Skip to content

calendars

The Phase of the Year: Something the Gregorian Calendar Gets Very Wrong

In the first article of the series, we concluded that days and years are the appropriate periods of our calendar. In the second article, we determined the optimal phase of the day. Each day should begin and end on midnight because of its astronomical relevance and biological convenience. That leaves us with the phase of the year. The period of our year is already synchronized with the seasons. We just need to decide where among the seasons we should divide one year and the next. This is the first time, though not the last, that we will find that the Gregorian calendar falls over completely.

The Phase of the Day: Something else the Gregorian Calendar Gets Right

In the last calendars post, we concluded that days and years were the proper periods for a calendar. But their underlying natural phenomena are cycles without beginning and without end. To be useful in a calendar, we need to be able to put particular events on particular days and years. We need to be able to count and label days and years. To do that, we need to pick a dividing line between one day and the next, between one year and the next. When does one day start and one day end? When does one year roll over to the next? We'll call these properties the phases of our days and years. For the phase of the day, we'll find that the Gregorian calendar once again gets something spot on.

Leap Years: Something the Gregorian Calendar Gets Right

Calendars coordinate people with people. It is better to be on vacation the same week your family is also. It is better for kids to be in school the same days as their teachers. It is better to be at work when everyone else is. (Though it is worse to be driving to said work when everyone else is.) In the modern world, it can be easy to think that coordinating people with people is all calendars do. If that were all, we could certainly do with a much simpler calendar—4 weeks to a month, 12 months to a year, no leap days, no irregularities forever. I won't argue that it couldn't be simpler, but I will argue that it cannot be perfectly simple. Because calendars also coordinate people with nature.