The Daily: 29 February 2024

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Today is Leap Day. This is the day we insert into the calendar to make up for the fact that the year is not actually 365 days. The Earth circles the sun in 365 days, Earth-rotations, plus about 6 more hours. Not exactly 6 hours though. The actual difference is 5 hours and 49 minutes. More or less.

The Romans stuck this intercalary day at the end of their year, Roman New Year being the first day of March. That missing 11 minutes didn’t bother Rome too much, because Rome didn’t last long enough for it to add up. The Roman reckoning added a day only every 128 years. However, by the 16th century those piled up 11 minutes had shifted the days into rather discordant territory. By Pope Gregory XIII’s day, the vernal equinox fell in April and, therefore, Easter had wandered right into summer — where, for many reasons, it should not be.

So Gregory took it upon himself to synchronize the solar calendar and the Church calendar. In the year 1582, he removed 10 days from October. This put all the Church holidays back where they should be, starting with 25 December 1582 falling a few days after the winter solstice — and all was right with the world.

Except Gregory didn’t want that 11 minutes to mess things up again. Now the Roman cycle, by happy circumstance (or maybe planning, because Romans…), had Leap Year fall in years divisible by four. This makes calculations simple. It wasn’t too much more math to figure out how to account for the 11 minutes. Gregory decreed that Leap Year would be every four years — except when the year was divisible by 100 but not by 400. So 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not Leap Years, but 2000 was. 2100 will not be. Those born on 29 February 2096 will not get a second birthday until 29 February 2104.

That’s if we still follow this calendar… which, who knows… I suppose it works well enough, but it is confusing from a luna-solar perspective. And one has reason to believe that the Western command of time might not be quite as strong in the late years of this century. So the lunar calendars might be more widely adopted. Those have their own ways of reckoning the 11 minutes.

There have been various attempts to make the Western calendar more sensible, more intuitive, like having the same number of days in each month or setting solar events to fall on the same date each year. The Soviet Union decided to give each month 30 days, with the five extra intercalary days turned into holidays. This had the peculiar consequence of putting a 30 February in the Soviet calendar for the years 1930 and 1931. But it was too difficult to reckon time so close to, but yet so different from, the rest of Europe. In 1932 the experimental calendar was abandoned.

J R R Tolkien created a calendar for Middle Earth that was very similar to the Soviet experiment. I sometimes wish we could follow his hobbit time, Shire Reckoning. A month is 30 days, and weeks are 7 days, so the moon still fell out of sync with the sun and months were not actually moon cycles as it seems like they ought to be. But the intercalary days are far more interesting. There are five, three around midsummer and two around midwinter. For Leap Year, another day was added to the midsummer celebration. And that is the chief reason I like the calendar. Like the Soviet intercalary days, the hobbit Yuledays and Lithedays, in winter and summer respectively, were holidays. More or less compulsory holidays. And for hobbits this meant celebration. Which meant food! Moreover, the actual day of the solstice — Lithe, as well as that Leap Year day, the Overlithe — were not accounted as days in the year at all. Lithe and Overlithe had no month name, no weekday name, and no date associated with them. This has the interesting mathematical effect of allowing every year to start on the same weekday. So the days of the week did not shift relative to the days of the year. If you were born on a Tuesday, you celebrated your birthday on a Tuesday every year. And if you were born on a Saturday, well then…

But Hobbits also didn’t really have a work week like ours. A regulated and regular work schedule that paid no regard to what labor actually needed to be done seems rather at odd with the Shire. And their calendar was riddled with days to celebrate. So perhaps Tuesday birthdays were just as fun as Saturday. I can’t imagine a hobbit going to work on his birthday in any case, though there also doesn’t seem to be a lot of “going to work” at all. Hobbits did necessary work when it was necessary, not by some wage-hour schedule, and mostly that necessary work happened at home.

I’m sure you now see why I like the Shire calendar. I think the world would be a healthier place if we did necessary work when it was necessary and spent most of our time celebrating life and being together — almost all of it at home. There would be much less waste, much less tension and stress, much more time to rest, time to be content, time to sit quietly and smoke a pipe in the garden just in appreciation of the day. There would be much less taking from the world, much less extraction, much less “profit”. But each day would be richer and more lived.

I was heavily influenced by Tolkien when I was a child and this idea stuck with me. But then a few years ago, I read Surviving the Future by David Fleming (with Shaun Chamberlin as posthumous editor) and understood that this slowing of the calendar to include celebratory time was key to reclaiming our lives. Fleming calls it carnival time and suggests that this is the way time used to be organized, even in the West. This is how we used to live when we lived well.

He shows that under the Church calendar, people worked much less than we do now. As much as half of the year, work was proscribed. Some of those holy days were for fasting and prayer. Some were for feasting and praise. And every Sunday was a day of actual rest, a day to think on our relationship to the numinous, or just think on life, though I’m sure more than a few of those bowed heads were actually thinking of nothing at all — which is also necessary! Moreover, in agricultural societies — like the Shire, like Europe in the Middle Ages — there are many months where there is no need to work more than a couple hours a day. If you follow Earth-based time, as Fleming proposed, then you do not do needless work, make work, busy work. And when there is no necessary work, then you do not work at all except for what daily tasks your own body requires — which is hardly work when you can go about cooking and cleaning and mending at a leisurely pace with no wage work sucking up the daylight hours.

And in the winter, we rest. We gather and celebrate. We make carnival to spread the wealth of the world to everyone. We fill all the bellies and tell all the stories. And we don’t mind the clock. There are no clocks in carnival time. Just the sun, the moon, and the stars.

But winter is ending now. It is time to be busier. And this is very stressful. It is ridiculously difficult to get real work done when it needs to be done around the edges of time in this system of wage work scheduling, most especially in the times of the year when there is much to do. Like spring. It is time to prepare the garden for the growing season. In Earth time, if we don’t get this spring work done, then we don’t eat. But in wage work time, we are kept from doing the real work because we have to spend so much time doing make work. But I think we’re kept from doing that real work with some intention also. If we don’t get the garden planted, then we have to spend money on the fruits of other laborers. Our economy doesn’t want us to get the garden planted, at least not with any sort of practical goals. Oh, you can spend all you like on annual flowers, I suppose, but no potatoes. But I have potatoes to plant. So with one toe in Earth time and the rest of my body marching to wage work rhythms, I feel like spring is pulling me apart.

I’ve never explicitly said as much, but reclaiming Earth time is the prime focus of this writing project. It’s why I write about all these holidays, all these regular reasons to take time away from wage time and focus on being alive on This Particular Day. Reclaiming time is reclaiming our lives, you know. This is the message in Surviving the Future, among others. Getting back to Earth time is getting back to real living, based in the moment, based on the needs of the day. It is taking back the time stolen by wage work to get real work done — and then stop. No make work just to make profit. Get the real work done and then gather and celebrate and rest. Or just smoke a pipe in the garden, if you’ve a mind.

In the Roman Catholic calendar, saints who died on 29 February have feast days on 28 February. There are no holy days today. But in the Orthodox calendar, 29 February is the feast of John Cassian. Cassian does not get a feast day in regular years because he was the last to heed Christ’s call to work and, as a result, is viewed as something of an idle layabout. In Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesbos, 29 February is celebrated as the shirkers’ feast.

I think that a good first step in reclaiming real time from wage time would be to take these intercalary days and make them the holidays, the time out of time, that they used to be, that they are designed to be. There should be no wage work on a holy, in-between, time out of time. And what better day to begin that reclaiming than today — the Shirker’s Feast!

I think I feel a sudden mysterious emergency coming on… must go home…

It is getting on to spring.

There is real work to be done.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024