Thirteen Months

This 12 months to a year thing is crazy.  Some months have 30 days, others have 31, and February has 28, unless it has 29.  It’s just weird.  And it takes kids a while to figure it all out.  You can’t blame them either… it’s confusing.

Things would be much easier if we went to a 13-month year.

There are 365 (and change) days in a year.  That works out to 52 weeks plus one day.  52 is not divisible by 12, but is divisible by 13.  So 13 months of 4 weeks (each month being 28 days) would get us really close to 365.  The extra day (or two, in the case of leap year) could be tacked onto the end of the last month just to make things easy.  Not in the middle like it is normally done in February.  Again, weird.

There are other advantages too.  Since each month would be exactly four weeks, the days of the month would fall on the same day of the week for the entire year.  So if the 1st is a Thursday in the first month of the year, it will be a Thursday every month of that entire year.

Of course if we switched we wouldn’t be able to call them months any longer, because they wouldn’t be based on lunar cycles. 

I propose that we call the new “month” Smarch.  Except for the fact that Smarch has lousy weather.

The concept of going by the phase of the moon to determine time is pretty outdated at this point.  We all use calendars, computers, and cell phones to know what the date is.  But moving to a 13-period year would make the whole process much easier… it’s easier to remember the date if, for an entire year, the days of the month fall on the same days of the week.

Of course I’m not serious about changing, but it would make things much simpler.  Now we just need days made up of 25 100-minute hours.