The Dance of Time: The Origins of the Calendar

Do you know that the traditional Romans left sixty days of winter out of their calendar, contemplating these two months a useless time of lurking terror and subsequently higher left unnamed? That that they had a horror of even numbers, therefore the tendency for months with an odd variety of days? That robed and bearded druids from the Celts stand behind our New Yr’s determine of Father Time? That if Thursday is Thor’s day, then Friday belongs to his trustworthy spouse, Freya, queen of the Norse gods? That the title Easter might derive from the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, Eostre, whose consort was a hare, our Easter Bunny? 
Three streams of historical past created the Western calendar—first from the Sumerians, then from the Celtic and Germanic peoples within the North, and eventually from Palestine with the rise of Christianity. Michael Decide teases out the contributions of every stream to the form of the calendar, to the times and holidays, and to related lore. In them, he finds glimpses of a method of seeing earlier than the mechanical time of clocks, when the rhythms of man and girl matched these of earth and sky, and the sacred was born.