On 20 Feb 2018 at 18:50, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) wrote:

> Wasn't that long ago that every day on a church calendar showed the
> name of a saint or saints. On my mother's side of the family a person
> got their middle name from the patron saint of their birthday. Hence,
> my mother received the name of a male saint as a middle name, which is
> not that uncommon w/i the latin-language world. Lot's of men with
> 'Maria' as a middle name. Traditionally, in Mexico, a person
> celebrated their name-saints day rather than their birthday.

Many years ago I was writing some code to do a *simplified*
"medieval" church calendar. It was mostly for SCA use to give the old
time flavor of dating messages and the like with

Octvember 37th,
The feast St Vidicon of Cathode
In the Year of Our Lord 2745

The rules for the Church calendar are *very* weird and more than a
bit complex.

To start with every day of the year has *at least* one saint
associated with it.

Which one ges celebrated depends a lot on things like local customs
(so for example, in Denmartk, if one is Danish and the other isn't,
they'd go with the Danish one unless the othr one was a *realkly*
important Saint)

Then you get into the fixed and movable feasts. Fixed ones are on the
same day of the year, every year. Christmas, and Epiphany  for
example.

Moveable ones are generally tied to the date of Easter which changes
from year to year according to some complicated rules. That means
everything from Shrove Tuesday (the day before lent stars) to the
XXth Sunday After Pentecost shifts around.

Now add the fact that there are *more* precedents between things.
various of the moveable feasts are more important than the feasts of
minor saints (and some are more important than the feats of *major*
saints. For example, it doesn't matter *who* the saint is, if Easter
Sunday falls on their day, Easter takes precedence!)

I never completed the program, but the rough algorithm was to set up
an array with all the days of the year in it. Fill it with the saints
days and fixed feasts.

Next figure out the movable feasts and and dump them on the
appropriate days (replacing whatever saint's day that was). Oh yeah,
some important saints get their day "bumped" if a major movable feast
falls on it. So it happens a day later (possibly several in rare
cases)

I think there was a another step after that, but it's been a lotta
years.

Note I had a Catholic Priest who had in interest in the liturgical
calendar (beyond that required by the job :-) helping me out. And
he'd dropped several of the more arcane rules that the current system
uses.

This sort of thing could be fun for local flavor on some worlds.

Other religions have their own odd calendars. Like the Ba'hai
calender of 19 months of 19 days, plus 4 intercalary days (5 in leap
years).

Local calendars (which will be based on the local solar day (sol) and
lengtyh of the local year) will be fun as well.
--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com