How many weeks are there in a month? Four, right? No, not really. A quick tally shows four of our months have 30 days, seven have 31 days and there is one month with 28. Yeah, 28 days is four weeks, but that’s only 75% of the time. Every fourth year February has 29 days, aka leap year. In short, every month has four weeks plus some fraction of a week.
But so what? That’s how the calendar works, right? There’s just no way we can get to four week months, the days just don’t divide up the right way. Or do they?
If you take the 365 days in a full year and divide it by the 28 days of a four week month you get darn close to an even number: 13.03571428571429. Huh, that’s very nearly 13 four-week months, with just a little leftover. Well, if you tinker around some you will discover that subtracting one day from 365 gives you an even 13, with a one day remainder. That means we really could have a year full of four-week months, it’s just that there would be 13 of them and there would be one full day left over.
Really, one day isn’t so hard to recon with. There’s already a New Year’s Day holiday after all. How big a leap is it to strip this one day out of the rest of the year’s months and call it a stand alone New Year’s holiday? And every fourth year would be a double super holiday, aka leap year again. Done, every month has four weeks, 28 days, 672 hours, etc.
But what about your birthday, right? What about Christmas? We would lose track of all those special dates we are so used to celebrating every year, wouldn’t we? Well no, not really. Consider that the number of days in the year isn’t changing. To map your special date onto the new calendar, just count the number of days from the first of the year on the old calendar and it will be the same day in the new. Simple.
But where would the new month go and what would it be named? The most practical approach would be to fit in the new month right after December, though there’s no reason it couldn’t go somewhere else. For that matter all the months could be shuffled around or renamed. And since the international standard could be just the number of the month, week and day, every country could name the months whatever they wanted. Indeed the seemingly intractable naming problem could be rendered moot by letting every interested state or city name the months whatever they wanted.
So there it is. Our year really should have 13 months, not 12. I’m not particularly superstitious about the new unlucky number of months, but a great many people around the world definitely are. They will not like a 13th month, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a fabulous idea.