Ye Olde Christmassy Eve

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This morning the Sun came out with beautiful clear blue skies.

Not so yesterday when I ventured outside to gaze upon this promised eclipse.

It was completely clouded over!

See even Mother Nature seems to abide by Murphy’s Law!

There is always a downside to most things, and as welcome as the sun was, it did its best to show up all the dust, crumbs, cat hairs and bits of Christmas past.

So I started my spring cleaning early this year.

To start with I took down all the decorations and then thought.

“Oh dam! I wonder if that’s bad luck for the next 360 days, for taking them down early?

I know it is bad luck to leave them up after the Twelfth Night, but surely not everyone can be expected to down the lot on the 6th January, or Epiphany as it’s more correctly labelled.

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I went away to read up on this and found out that today, 5th January is known as Old Christmas Eve. So tomorrow is Old Christmas Day and all us old ’ns can, if we feel up to it, go through the whole celebration again! (not really).

It appears this all goes back to around 1582 actually, and as I was saying in my last post, all these dates are purely relative and have changed, time and time again.

From the time of Julius Caesar, this country used the Julian Calendar. It was based on the sun’s orbit and was much better than the previous system, based on the phases of the moon. But it was not accurate enough and every year was eleven minutes and fifteen seconds out.

So what you ask, who would notice?

Well, that adds up to one day out, every one hundred and twenty eight years.

So once again, as no-one ever reached the magnificent age of 128, it went unnoticed by the serfs and peasants.

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But…..by the sixteenth century, this error had accumulated to ten day too many.

Not many people spotted this in their daily lives, but the Pope did.

Pope Gregory XIII was ‘at the crease’ at the time and at the ‘stroke of a quill‘, lopped eleven minutes, fifteen seconds off the length of a year and deleted the spare ten days!

This was the Gregorian Calendar and was adopted throughout Catholic Europe.

Us stubborn Protestants on this side of the English channel weren’t going to be told by the Pope, what day it was and so stuck rigidly to our Julian calendar.

This meant that Paris was ten days behind London.

We also kept the 25th March as the start of a New Year.

By the time Protestant England came round to adopting this Gregorian calendar we were eleven days out, and so, in 1752, these eleven days were given the chop.

As to be expected, there were riots with people demanding

“Give us our days back!“

Prior to this seismic event England had celebrated Christmas on the equivalent of 6th January.

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And this dear friends, is why today is “Olde Christmas Eve”

and this Olde fellow is just off to hang up his Olde stocking for a second time -

hoping to get those goodies I missed out on, the first time round!

But I may not bother putting up all those

decorations again!

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ps. I apologise to the people of Ireland, Scotland and Wales for no mention, but I found no details of how these plans were implemented in their

respective homelands.

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