That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
Sonnet 73, William Shakespeare
December sure got here fast, didn’t it? Did we skip a couple of months?
December actually gets its name from the Latin word decem, meaning 10, and was originally the 10th month of the year.
The Romans decided winter was too lousy to have actual months and dates. Still, January and February were added later after Julius Caesar found that the Egyptian calendar, with its 12 months of 30 days each and five epagomenal days, worked better.
Not a lot of people know this, but during the Egyptian epagomenal days, you were required to say “Way-oh, way-oh, ooh-way-oh-way-oh” at least three times a day and strike a pose like a Cadillac whenever possible.
The Egyptians called their 12th month Shemu Mesore, or the fourth month of low water. During the inaugural month of the Egyptian new year that followed the month of Shemu Mesore, the Nile would flood like in the old Johnny Cash song:
Well, the hives are gone, and I’ve lost my bees. The chickens are sleepin’ in the willow trees. Cows in water up past her knees, three feet high and risin’.
Not exactly a good time for a New Year’s Eve party, but maybe that’s the real reason they built the pyramids.
I did not attend a New Year’s Eve party last year. I found myself on a bed at St. Mary’s Good Samaritan hospital with IVs in my arms on New Year’s Day 2025, which I wrote about in this space.
Remember?
But that seems like it happened about three weeks ago, not almost a year. It could have been worse, I guess.
Venus makes its trip around the sun in just 225 days, so 2025 would have seemed even shorter for a Venusian. But days are not 24 hours long everywhere, according to NASA.
If you generally eat breakfast at sunrise and dinner at sunset, you’re going to be mighty hungry at suppertime on Venus since the interval between sunrise and sunset there is 117 Earth days.
Martians, on the other hand, eat about the same time as we do, but they don’t have as many New Year’s Eve parties, since the Martian year is 687 days long.
If you are a Neptunian, you’d have to live 165 Earth years to celebrate your first birthday since the planet takes 60,190 days to make its trip around the solar system.
“But what about Uranus, T. Michael?” I hear you ask.
OK. When Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Paul Anka — all of whom are now 84 years old — were born, Uranus was just beginning a new orbital path lasting 30,687 days and covering 1.78 billion miles.
But before I even think about Uranus and New Year’s Eve, I have to get through December, which is more and more difficult for me.
It’s bad enough that December is cold and gloomy, but the days get shorter and shorter until we reach the winter solstice, which is the shortest day of the year. And the longest night.
On top of that, you have Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD, perhaps the greatest acronym of all time), which is caused by a shortage of daylight. I may already have my annual case of it.
This confluence of misery got so bad in December of 2007 that the leaders of the Global Consciousness Project created something called the Annual Synchronized Global Orgasm for Peace.
Organizers believed the event would “add so much concentrated and high-energy positive input into the energy field of the Earth that it [would] reduce the current dangerous levels of aggression and violence throughout the world,” according to a story in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Based on a cursory analysis of today’s headlines, I don’t think it worked.
The Vikings had other methods of coping.
According to history.com, Norwegian King Hakon the Good stipulated that every man had to drink at least four gallons of alcohol over the course of three nights during December Yule celebrations. I’m assuming the alcohol helped wash down the horse meat.
Have mercy!
Selah.