Time Flies!

Have you ever gone to put the date on a document, check, assignment, etc. and looked to someone for confirmation of the correct date, only to realize you must have lost a few days along the way?  Imagine waking up one morning, only to discover it was 11 days later?  That is exactly what happened  when people of the British colonies went to bed on September 2, 1752.  They woke up and found it was September 14th!!

The reason for this jump in dates had to do with the calendar. Prior to 1582, the Julian calendar (invented by none other than Julius Caesar) had been used as the standard measure of counting days, months, years, etc.  The problem with this was that there had been an error in this calendar.  Every 128 years, the calendar was out of sync with the equinoxes and solstices by one day.  As time passed, the calendar became more inaccurate, and was inarticulately determining the date of Easter-- a very important date to Catholics.

Pope Gregory XIII decided that the old Julian calendar should be disregarded, and a new calender used to bring the date of Easter, which was to be the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the Vernal Equinox back to where it belonged.

How did they do this?  Ten days were omitted from the calendar to bring it back into sync with the solstices.  The Pope then decreed that the day following Thursday, October 4, 1582 would be Friday, October 15, 1582.

That was fine for the Catholic countries who followed the Pope.  Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Poland immediately began following what was to become the "Gregorian Calendar"  However, the Protestant countries were a bit more difficult to sell on a calendar that had been revised by a Catholic Pope.

As a result, the British colonies, including those soon to be known as the United States, did not begin following the new Gregorian Calendar until September of 1752.  Greek Orthodox countries did not come over to this way of thinking until the beginning of the 20th century!

I can think of a number of reasons why I may have been a bit upset about this change.  What if your birthday, anniversary, any special day fell within this time frame?  Not only that, but New Year's Day was thrown all up for grabs!  The Julian calendar had New Year's celebrated closer to the beginning of spring or "new life".  Suddenly, the Gregorian calendar changed it to January 1st.  Poor George Washington fell victim to that date change-- however that was kind of a good news bad news deal.  While the bad news was his birthday went from February 11th to February 22nd, it also made him a year younger.  As the date if the new year changed from March to January,  Washington, born in February, had the year of his birth changed from 1731 to 1732.

The country of Nova Scotia didn't know what date is was for a while!  While it was under Catholic rule, it followed the new Gregorian calendar from 1605 to 1710 when the British took over and it reverted back to the Julian calendar.  It went back to the Gregorian calendar with the other British colonies in 1752.

So, as you relax this Labor Day weekend, be glad you at least know what the date is...