Odd O'blography

Solstice Reflections

It's that time of year again, and I just completed a poem, Dark Time, for The Solstice Poetry Contest . A couple of years ago, I wrote a story, Solstice Day  for The Whatever Contest -- Closed for Now . In my story, I described a rationalized calendar that has 13 months with 28 days each (364 days). A holiday called Solstice Day would be inserted in mid-June to complete a 365-day year. Every four years, another Solstice Day would be inserted in mid-December to account for leap year. I knew this calendar wasn't original with me, the basic idea has been around for hundreds of years. What I didn't know when I wrote the story was that this calendar almost became reality exactly one hundred years ago.

Last month I read an article in The Washington Post about an effort to implement the very calendar I describe in my story. The International Fixed Calendar (IFC) was proposed in 1923 by The League of Nations. There was a burst of optimism after 'the war to end all wars' and the promise of science and technology seemed bright. They wanted to rationalize the months and days to create a perennial calendar. George Eastman was a fervent supporter of this idea, and his Eastman Kodak company actually used the IFC internally for many years. The only difference from my story is that the IFC inserts the 'extra' day between December 28 and January 1st.

The opposition to the IFC came primarily from the Jewish community. They hold the seven-day cycle as sacred law and objected to a 'nothing' day that would shift the Sabbath by one day every year. The traditional Hebrew calendar inserts an entire month every four years to align with the solar calendar, but it always maintains the sabbath on Saturday. Other traditionalists also objected and the IFC was never implemented by any world government. The effort was abandoned in 1937 when it failed to win final approval from The League of Nations.