[Dargon-writers-list] Hmm. Calendar Question!

[White, John]

> From:  Ornoth D.A. Liscomb
> 
> At 12/21/2007 01:02 AM, VC wrote:
> 
> >While we aren't bound to earth conventions, I thought that our 
> >seasons and calendar pretty much matched that of earth. Help!
> 
> While I'm not the person to help you resolve it, I can tell you the 
> history of some of it.
> 
> I originally created the calendar. The month names matched up with 
> ours, and the dates roughly matched. Note that there's even a "leap 
> day" added to Melrin every four years, giving us Earth's 365.25 
> days/year. Melrin was originally designed to be the equivalent of the 
> 2nd or 3rd week of May, a bit after the Beltane cross-quarter day. 
> C.f. "Truespring".
> 
> Later someone decided to start the year in Deber, rather than Janis. 
> No idea who, but people decided they liked it, so mote it was. 
> Changing the start of the year doesn't necessarily mess up the 
> seasons any; it's just that the year ends in early winter, 
> rather than mid.
> 
> -o

Here's how I've rationalized the calendar:

The first thing to note is that while the month names tend to be
somewhat equivalent, they don't actually match with their cooresponding
Earth dates due to the facts that 1) the new year starts so close to the
winter
solstice, and 2) the first month of the year is Deber (December).  Thus,
what Dargonians call Deber is what we call January.  Everything is off
by
28 or so days.  This is, of course, compounded by the fact that all of
the
months are even (all 30 days), so the months move just a bit further for
that.

Melrin has, pretty obviously, mutated into a summer festival by
slippage.  I
would tend to call it a mid-year festival, or an early summer festival,
and
it's not a month, it's a week-long party time.

I suppose that this is what happens when people who don't really know
what
they're doing start messing around with things like calendars and lunar
cycles
and all of that cool stuff .....

            \\Dafydd (not dead, just acting like it)