364 days a year?

There are many things about our calendar and ways of keeping time that leave you scratching your head. We have seven months of 31-days and yet we shortchange February by giving it a measly 28 days (and 29 every once in awhile). The calendar most of the Western world uses is the Gregorian Calendar, which is named after Pope Gregory VIII who introduced it in 1582. At the time of its introduction much of the Western world used the Julian Calendar, named after Julius Caesar who debuted the calendar in 45 B.C.

The Julian Calendar was exactly 365 ¼ days long. The earth?s revolution around the sun is shorter than that by 11 minutes, so that every 400 years the date of the solstices was moving up three days from when they were supposed to occur. The Gregorian Calendar fixed that problem by eliminating leap days on years that were divisible by 100 except those that were also divisible by 400 (pretty complicated, I know). For instance, the year 1900 was not a leap year but the year 2000 was.

One problem the Gregorian Calendar did not fix was that, since 365.2425 days in a year does not divide easily into seven, dates fall on different days of the week from one year to the next. Jan. 4 is a Wednesday this year but a Thursday next year. This is not so bad when holidays fall on weekends, as they did this year when Christmas and New Year?s were on Sunday. That allows people time to travel to visit loved ones. Traveling is much more difficult when Christmas falls in the middle of the week.

I was heartened to learn that faculty at Johns Hopkins University have solved this problem by inventing their own calendar that would allow Christmas to be a Sunday every year. The astronomer Richard Conn Henry and the economist Steve Hanke have devised a calendar called the ?Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar.? The calendar is 364 days long most years, making it divisible by seven. Eight months of the year would be 30 days long and then every third month would be 31 days long. The most interesting aspect of Henry?s calendar is that it would add an entire week every five to six years.

I am a supporter of the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar because it would make planning easier but most of all because I hate traveling in the middle of the week. In 2008, Christmas was on a Thursday which meant I had to not only miss much of our family time on Christmas Eve but that I would also have to drive back to my place of work (then in Webster City) on Christmas Day. This past year was ideal because I was able to spend all of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with my family.