The Christian Calendar for 2022-2026
A Note About The Numbering Of Days
(from Daily Contemplations For Misfit Christians)
Daily Contemplations for Misfit Christians is based on the historical Christian calendar, Western version, which is based on the Jewish lunar calendar.
Here’s where it gets complicated.
The standard secular calendar (imposed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582) arranges the solar year into 12 months of 28, 29, 30, or 31 days.
The Christian calendar has 5 Big Holy Days. One (Pentecost) is lifted from Jewish tradition. Another (Easter) is determined by the lunar calendar.
Once you know when Easter will be then Pentecost is 50 days later. Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday immediately precede Easter Sunday.
The Western Christian calendar also has two big holy days that have fixed dates on the Western secular calendar—Christmas (December 25th) and Epiphany (January 6th).
Once the Big Holy Days are determined, the Christian year is divided into 4 seasons: Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter. Some of the seasons are marked by Sundays (4 in Advent, 7 in Lent); some by numerical days (12 in Christmas, 50 in Easter).
All the other days are distributed between Epiphany and Lent, and between Pentecost and Advent.
Basically, the Christian year is a mutt of the moon, the Big Holy Days, and the Gregorian calendar.
We find this fascinating but confusing.
In our books, all those days that aren’t officially part of the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter—that is, most of the year—we are calling Common Time and numbering them sequentially, e.g. Common 1, Common 2 …. Common 212, and so forth.
We guarantee that in our Annual Editions you have at least 52 Sundays to draw from. The rest is up to you, Pope Gregory, and the moon.