Dear Friends, the next Baha’i Book Study will be on 19 February at 7:30
We have some travel occurring early in Feb, so the next Book Study will be February 19th, which is a Tuesday as usual.
As you may know, the Bahá'í Holiday of Ayyám-i-Há is coming up and some people have asked about it.
The Festival of Ayyám-i-Há refers to a period of intercalary days in the Bahá'í calendar, when Bahá'ís celebrate the four or five days that are inserted between the last two months of the calendar (Mulk and `Alá'). Since the Bahá'í Calendar has 19 months of 19 days each year, there needed to be a way to make the days come out correctly. On leap years, this time is the full five days otherwise it is four days.
The 2019 dates for Ayyam-i-Ha are from sunset on Monday, February 25th to sunset on Friday, March 1st.
During this time it is customary (in our home) to exchange gifts. This is not a serious holy-day event, but a joyous celebration of the time of festival before the 19 days of fasting that occur prior to the Bahá'í New Year on the first day of spring (“Naw-Ruz” in Persian).
Only healthy people are asked to fast, but all are invited to celebrate the days between the beginning and the end of the Bahá'í Calendar.
But wait, there’s more…
The Earth has the habit of actually taking 365.24 days to rotate around our sun. So the Calendar established by Pope Gregory calls for 12 months of different number of days (Thank you Julius Caesar) with poor February gaining a day every four years.
However, Aloysus Lilius, the Italian scientist who developed the system Pope Gregory unveiled in 1582, realized that the addition of so many days made the calendar slightly too long. I hate it when my calendar is too long!
He devised a variation that adds leap days in years divisible by four, unless the year is also divisible by 100. If the year is also divisible by 400, a leap day is added regardless. While this formula may sound confusing, it did resolve the lag created by Caesar’s earlier scheme—almost. I think it says that every 10,000 years everybody will need to burn his or her calendar, spin around, sing a song and start over.
So it may be that in 400 years there will be yet another leap-day added to keep our sun in agreement with our holiday celebration schedule. I will be very old then, so probably will not care.
Regardless, we will be looking forward to continuing our reading and discussion of Gleanings on Tuesday February 19th.
We will meet at 7:30, read and discuss for one hour, break for refreshments around 8:30 with yummies and more discussion for an hour, and leave about 9:30 as a kindness to those who must arise early in the morning to calibrate their sun dials.
Warm regards,
Peggy & David
602-697-1099