A new month is a celebration of nothing!

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

06 June 2021

A new trend is forming where people are wishing one another a “Happy New Month”. I guess the new year is taking too long to come by so… But when you think about it, while a new year marks the beginning of a new cycle of seasons, a new month is a celebration of nothing!

The main purpose of a calendar is to keep track of the seasons – winters and summers in the temperate regions; wet and dry in the tropics. The cycle repeats every year. Hence calendars from different civilisations have about 360 days per year.

But it is difficult to keep track counting 360 days so it is necessary to subdivide these into manageable groups. The moon provides a simple and convenient solution; it goes through approximately 12 cycles in one year hence most calendars have 12 months.

Now, 360 days is an estimate and so is 12 cycles of the moon, so, over the centuries, it became necessary to make adjustments to the number of days per year and per month. Today, they vary between 28 and 31 days…and our children take a long time trying to learn how many days each has!

If may digress, I still recall the day when I figured out my own way of telling the days per month. In a moment of daydreaming in class at primary school, it suddenly occurred to me that December and January have 31 days each.

I wondered how an odd numbered month (January) month and an even numbered one (December) could have the same number of days. At what point do the odd months change from 31 to 30 days? I looked at the calendar in the classroom and found August!

July is the last odd month with 31 days and August the first even month with 31 days. From that day, I stopped trying to learn the various songs that my classmates used to sing for the months of the year…

Back to today; we know that the seasonal cycles are caused by the motion of the earth around the sun. This journey takes 365.256 days. We also know that the phases of the moon take 29.5 [not 30] days.

When all these facts are taken into account, it turns out that the calendar month has no real physical significance. It does not coincide with the seasons nor the moon’s cycles. So, there is no point wishing a person a happy new month!