Between the Mayan will-we-or-won’t-we go down in smoke (or apocalypse) and the oddity that is our modern Gregorian Calendar, I’ve been thinking a lot about how odd our dating system is. It’s confounded by my desire to continue my 30-day challenge, which ideally would be for a month that actually encompasses 30 days (hath September, etc. etc. etc.). That means my lovely followers must wait until April to get my next series (it’s going to be a good one, I promise teasingly).

However, let’s consider how ridiculous the current calendar is. Intelligence would say, let’s go “metric” and follow the moon: 13 months of 28 days each = 364 days. Now, you may argue that this will further confound the fact that our current year is 365.25 days, requiring an extra day tacked onto February every four years… except when you get to the millennium when you don’t have a leap year. It’s like trying to make sense of liquid measurement: 8 ounces in a cup, two cups in a pint, two pints in a quart, four quarts in a gallon… Madness!

Thus, a year where one day is lopped off is no more arbitrary than a year when .25 is lopped off (well, not quite .25 but you don’t need to revisit this…). However, instead we have 365 days. But does this make better sense when four months are 30 days long and seven months are 31 days long and one month is either 28 or 29 days long? I mean, at the very least, wouldn’t it be better to have seven months of 30 days (210) and five months of 31 days (155) with every fourth year being six and six (for a total of 366 days)?

Aside from the fact that I’d have to be truly on my game and come up with a new 30 challenge topic every other month, it would leave us with a clear and firm date when the world is ending (the Mayan’s used two different calendars, meaning the world probably isn’t ending on December 21st). I mean, I don’t want to miss out on the end of the world. Do you?

So here’s my platform for world domination: One calendar; one Easter (yes, that whole Orthodox thing means I save a ton on discount Easter candy but my kids don’t get any time off from school on whack years like 2013 when western Easter is five weeks earlier); one Christmas; one Hanukkah (oh, Happy Hanukkah). It’s not strictly lunar, but at least it’s symmetrical.