I hosted a New Year’s celebration every year for 17 years, starting the year I turned 18 and started The Party Machine. Many years due to work conflicts (being an entertainer, I was often booked on New Year’s Eve) we hosted it on December 30th instead of the 31st.
We decided to write a creative Manifesto for celebrating on December 30.
We invaded the college library in the middle of final test week, and began serious scholarly research. We learned the fascinating history of how our modern calendar evolved, from the Julian calendar of the Romans, to our current Gregorian calendar, ordered by a medieval Pope, and designed to correct differences in solar and lunar time.
It was an improvement, but the politics of the Protestant Reformation meant that different countries adopted the new calendar at different times. England, in particular, refused to accept the Pope’s calendar for 200 years.
Changing the calendar got the peasants revolting!
The difference was between 10 and 11 days when England (and the American colonies) finally changed to the Gregorian calendar, and so they had to add them back. But it was still not accurate, so our custom of adding a day on Leap Year began, adding more confusion.
The conclusion, based on our pseudo-scientific and chemically influenced college research, was that today’s calendar is off between 7 and 8 hours.
With a wee bit of rationalization, we figured that is almost an entire day of work – sort of – and thus the calendar was off by a day, and New Year’s Eve should rightfully be on December 30.
Since the Teeming Millions are accustomed to celebrating on the 31st and are averse to change, and because I make a pretty good living for working for some of them at New Year’s Eve parties, we decided to celebrate both days.
We called it the Two Party System.
Happy New Year, Pun Fans!