The Calendar Cycle

Vs. 

When I was little, it seemed to me that the calendar was a rotating wheel of normal days and less-frequent holidays, and I was really surprised when I realized that holidays used to be holy days.  How is eating sugar or getting out of school, holy?  But that's the nature of language and presumably something about the days themselves changing in focus or meaning for the people talking about them, helped the term along in its transition from one to the other; from one word, to two.

I don't know what age I'm remembering when I say when I was little, but it seemed to me that there were holidays every once in awhile and that they were sprinkled throughout the year.  



If I was to divide the year into two parts, back then, it would have been Summer, meaning no school, and then the rest of the year.  And to me, back then, both parts of the year had some holidays in them that broke up the monotony of things.  Dividing the year that way puts Christmas about halfway through the non-Summer part of the year so it still had an important place on the calendar to me, but now I think it's gotten quite out of hand.

Now, I picture the year in two parts, but they are not School and not-School: they are normal time and Gaudy Time.  Gaudy time starts with a spooky satire of itself each year on October 31 and rolls on through January 1.  

We need that day, and maybe one or two more, to recover from Gaudy Time, which moves along a little slowly right after Halloween, gets faster and faster and then crescendos into Christmas, and finally goes out with a little bang (that's built up but never gets quite the return on the investment that one might expect).  

I guess that steady rise, faster and louder build-up and a little let-down with a quick look back help to start the wheel rolling again, in that there is just enough speed and motion to keep the inertia in play so that the heavier side of the wheel doesn't roll backward on itself and the whole thing keeps spinning 'round instead of wobbling back and forth like a weighted top, until we get to the next Holidays, right on schedule, next year.

That's what I really mean when I say Gaudy Time: what we now call The Holidays.  Holidays aren't sprinkled throughout the year anymore.  They are a season now unto themselves.  There's The Holidays and then there is that other, longer part of the year.  

Is it Schumann Resonance or the reminiscence effect, or maybe Murphy's Law or Moore's?  I know it's not just me, but this last year went faster, didn't it?

Didn't it?