My Lunar Calendar

If you’ve looked through my LiveJournal, you may have noticed that I date my posts using a nontraditional calendar. Several months ago, I adapted a calendar created by a friend and former teacher into something I could use for personal date-keeping.

It reflect my tastes and phenomena I identify with, occuring around me up here in Windsor, Connecticut.

The start/end dates of the months in my calendar are available here. A more detailed explanation of the calendar follows.

Days

Days run from sunset to sunset, following the practice of most cultures that use lunar-based calendars.

Months

Months begin at the first sunset where the new crescent moon should theoretically be visible. I assume that the new moon can be visible as early as 16 hours after the astronomical new moon (hereafter referred to as the dark moon), a simplification suggested by some Muslim scholars, and one that I’ve been able to verify by personal observation. Other standards are 12 hours (used in Saudi Arabia, based on the ability to see the crescent in a telescope, rather than the unaided eye), or by actual observation (somewhat impractical in a wooded part of the country, while working a full-time job).

Given the emphasis on the moon in the calendar, I note the full and dark moons in my personal calendar. The full moon falls on the 13th, 14th or 15th day of the month. The dark moon falls on the 28th, 29th, or 30th day of the month.

Months are 29 or 30 days long. There are 12 or 13 months during the year.

Month Names

Eight of the months are based on their proximity to the quarters or cross-quarters of the year:

• Full Moon closest to the February cross-quarter: Cold Moon, because it’s generally pretty darn cold here in Connecticut at that time of year.
   
• Full Moon closest to the March equinox: Egg Moon. Easter will usually fall during this month, and what’s the pagan fertility ritual that got attached to Easter? The Easter Egg hunt!
   
• Full Moon closest to the May cross-quarter: Flower Moon. Spring usually hits this part of New England around then, and the flora tends to be in full bloom.
   
• Full Moon closest to the June solstice: Summer Moon, for the obvious reasons.
   
• Full Moon closest to the August cross-quarter: Heat Moon, because that’s frequently the hottest time of the year in this part of Connecticut.
   
• Full Moon closest to the September equinox: Harvest Moon. While there’s a lot of variation in folklore moon names, the one point of consistency is that the moon closest to the September equinox is called the Harvest Moon. That much tradition/precedence is too much to ignore, so I retain this convention, even if it causes the month to be a shade earlier than the actual local harvest season.
   
• Full Moon closest to the November cross-quarter: Remembrance Moon. Many cultures have used a date close to the November cross-quarter as a day to remember those who have died in the past.
   
• Full Moon closest to the December solstice: Long Night Moon. The longest nights of the year, ignoring DST shifts, falls around the witner solstice.

For the remaining moon-names, I debated what to do. I’ve seen some lunar calendars that I’ve liked that base moon-names on sequencing after the preceeding equinox or solstice (e.g., 1st/2nd/last moon after solstice). However, given the variability in new moon dates, I had problems coming up with fitting names. So, instead, I decided to base the leftover moon-names on the Gregorian calendar month (local time) in which the full moon occurs.

• January: Snow Moon. January is the snowiest month around here.
   
• February: Hunger Moon. Michaela and I watched Colonial House from PBS. I can imagine how February would be a very bleak month for settler-farmers, given the weather, and given the presumed depletion of food supplies.
   
• March: Chaste Moon. Well, if the next few months are going to be all about fertility in the agricultural sense, it might be nice to start off with some chastity….
   
• April: Sprouting Moon. About this time of year, the first bits of green start to show up behind the melting snow.
   
• May: Planting Moon. The average last frost date my part of Connecticut is May 15. Thus, the last part of May will usually see a lot of hustle and bustle around regional farms as they start to get crops in the ground.
   
• June: Pine Moon. Local pine trees get very sappy about the first week of June.
   
• July: River Moon. I wasn’t entirely sure what to call this month, since the natural names (Summer, Heat) are already assigned. Then I remembered that Hartford has a riverfront festival around Independence Day, and boating on local rivers, lakes, and reservoirs is a popular summertime activity.
   
• August: Tobacco Moon. In north-central Connecticut, shade- grown tobacco is the primary crop. There are tobacco farms at both ends of our street. so I’ve become very aware of the cycle of tobacco farming. Locally, tobacco is harvested during the last three weeks of August.
   
• September: Corn Moon. Corn is another common name in most variations of Anglo-American or Native American folk moon names. To the extent that corn and grains are grown in this part of the world, they tend to be harvested in early September.
   
• October: Pumpkin Moon. Among the last of the most noticeable crops to be harvested around my home are pumpkins, harvested in early-mid October.
   
• November: Frost Moon. The average first frost date in Windsor is September 15, although I haven’t seen a real killing frost until mid-late October. However, I think mid-late November is a "frost" time — morning are consistenly frosty, but snow is somewhat uncommon.
   
• December: Oak Moon. I had some problems deciding what to use for the name of full moons occurring in early December. Frost and snow would both be appropriate, but they belong better to November and January, respectively. Cold could work, but that also seems to be better associated with January. Finally, I thought of all the acorns that fall during autumn, and all the acorns that I clean up during November and December. Oaks are nice trees, and I already have Pine in for June, so using Oak for December seems to fit nicely.

Obviously, not all the moon names will get used in any given year. That does bother me, but the alternative (names not syncing with current events) bothers me more.

Years

I considered having the years in this calendar begin/end with the December solstice. However, that would mean that the Long Night Moon would be split across two years, which seems rather messy. So, under this calendar, years begin with the first month after the Long Night Moon.

I’m not particularly comfortable with naming years. I admit that there is a kind of beauty in recognizing a long cycle of years, but it doesn’t sit all that well for me. I want my years to be sequentially numbered, dag-nabbit.

However, since this is a calendar for personal use, I’m not obliged to use a year-numbering system based on a miscalculation of the year of a Christ’s birth.

I considered using 1633 — the year the English settled Windsor — as year 1 of my calendar. Then I did some reading into the Mayan calendar.

The long count is a system of Mayan date-keeping based on a base-20 numeral. Mayan religious/mathematical/astronomical/astrological leaders apparently determined the date of the end of the world to be the winter solstice in 2012, a date they defined to be 13.0.0.0.0 (or day number 13*20⁴ of Mayan history). Counting back, date 0.0.0.0.1 would have been sometime in 5782 BC.

Now, the Maya have nothing to do with life in Connecticut. However, I love the complexity in their calendar (even if I don’t want to use it), and picking 21 December 2012 as the end of the world has an odd appeal to me (I semi-joke that the year 2014 is the year the world will come to an end, in part because I’ll be 42 that year, and, well, that’s the answer. If a culture could arrive at almost the same conclusion over a thousand years ago, I’ve got to give them props for their reckoning). So, I designate 5782 BC as Year 1 of the Long Count, and figure from there.