#304 – Dick Bernard: New Year's Eve and the Perpetual Calendar: "What are you doing New Years, New Years Eve?"

This year the last day of the year coincides with the last day of the traditional American workweek.
Rather than muse about this or that, I simply took a look back in history to see the previous December 31sts which occurred on a Friday.
You can easily do this by looking at the perpetual calendar.
It turns out that the occurrence of Friday, December 31 is not as comfortably predictable as I thought*.
More or less they occur every five years, but not exactly, and there are odd variations as well.
Here are the last few:
2010
2004
1999
1993
1982
1976
1971
1965
1954 is the next earlier one; the next time December 31st falls on a Friday will be 2021 – the same interval as between 1982 and 1993.
We humans tend to act in the short term, often the very, very short term. As the song lyric goes, “What are doing New Years, New Years Eve?”
But we don’t live in a short-term world. What happens long term is what we need to think about.
For me, personally, I’m going to reflect on those specific years I just mentioned, and see how things were, then, what the country collectively thought, and what happened in the interval following.
It will be an interesting exercise.
1948
1943
1937
1926
1920
…
1830
Where will we be as a country and society in 2021?
We the people will have a great deal to say about that, for good or ill.
Among the treasure trove of sayings used by my school-teacher Dad to his scholars was “time passes, will you?”
Will we?
Happy New Year.
* – The ‘cycle’ appears to be 28 years.