EDF's December Calendar of Stories

Every Day Fiction's
December Table of Contents

Dec 1 Timothy Miller Vaccine
Dec 2 sn wright The Smell of Rust
Dec 3 Dee Martin Ladies Night
Dec 4 Deborah Winter-Blood Deadache
Dec 5 Therese Arkenberg Ameran Theatre
Dec 6 Wayne Scheer The Naked City
Dec 7 Larkin Cunningham Knowing Her Priorities
Dec 8 Michelle Klein Mutilation
Dec 9 S.J. Higbee A Boy’s Best Friend
Dec 10 Sarah Hilary Water’s Edge
Dec 11 Kevin Jewell Holiday Party Subjunctive
Dec 12 Debbie Burgess The Sacrifice
Dec 13 Stephen Taylor A Day at the Fur Auction
Dec 14 Gay Degani Flash Flood
Dec 15 Michael Mallory The Bite of War
Dec 16 John Brooke Bummer
Dec 17 Jim Reine The Last Patient
Dec 18 J.C. Towler EF 5
Dec 19 Brian George Dave Is Still Talking
Dec 20 Laura T Praderio Lynn Wheelchair Memories
Dec 21 Chris Allinotte Code Mustard
Dec 22 Oonah V Joslin Song of Everything
Dec 23 Mary Baader Kaley Giant Snowflakes
Dec 24 Ty Johnston Milk and Cookies
Dec 25 Cathryn Grant A Christmas Package
Dec 26 Sylvia Hiven Safe in Sparrow
Dec 27 Katherine Periam The Potion
Dec 28 Richard M. O’Donnell The Perfect Fit
Dec 29 Claire Webber She’s Fixed
Dec 30 Mickey Mills Fire on Falcon Road
Dec 31 Tanya Byrne Forever is a Locked Door

THAT time of the year

People all over the world are waking up and saying "November 28th? Already??"

I realize that maybe somewhere it's November 29th or maybe November 27th. I'm not very good at these kinds of factoids. Actually, time confuses me. Clocks confuse me. Hate digital because you have to count forward or backward in your head if you need to calculate. Hate standard big hands and little hands because if anyone is talking I can't focus. When I taught school and didn't use my egg timer, I had to tell students going on their break to be back at 10 minutes before it's three-thirty. Anyway, that's how I remember it.

So if I struggle with daily time you can imagine the trouble I have with yearly time, decade time, lifetime time. It's going by so fast now I try not to blink. Blinking seems to speed things up. But as with so much that happens to us in life, blinking refuses to be controlled.

Watching Big Bang Theory on my Tivo last night, Leonard who eats a cookie chocked full of weed screams that the earth is moving way too fast--"I can feel it!"

Raj puts on the brakes with his face and the earth slows. Would that it be that easy!

Sometimes I feel as if I'm surfing the earth, that there's a long unsteady board under my feet and I'm definitely NOT in the tunnel. Wish Raj would use his magic squinchy face for me and slow everything down.

My friend Carson has a good idea. He thinks that perhaps since the holidays swoop down on us with ever increasing speed, we should change the calendar so that we only have "holiday season" once every two years. Now this is a frigging brilliant idea. I love it. And why CAN'T we change the calendar? Julius did. We called it the Julian calendar. Then we got the Gregorian one. I assumed it was named by some pope after himself. (Was reminded of this on Jeopardy after I asked the question, 'What is Julian?' to a question I even begin to answer).

Anyway, if folks updated the calendar in the past, they can do it again.

And if Obama decrees it, then it should happen, right? It would be fun too because we'd get to rename twelve months. We'd keep the twelve we have, of course, but those month would be in the second part of the calendar so that Thanksgiving and Christmas could remain in November and December. The second twelve months would stay January, month 13, February, month 14, March, month 15 and so on...

We wouldn't worry the names don't make any sense because many of them never did. December, after all, isn't the 10th month. November isn't the 9th, October isn't the 8th, and September isn't the 7th. Clearly, we can do whatever we want since historically that's what people do.

So what do we name the 12 new months???? In the old days, months were often named after the gods, right? (I'm not researching this post, so if I mess it up, I'm just making some of this up, leave me a kind commentary. Consider this a discussion). Like I think January could have been name for Janus? March for Mars. June for Juno. And then there are the "gods" who walked the earth like, you know, the aforementioned Julius Caesar (July) and Octavian Caesar (August) who must have changed his name to Augustus so that when he added his month, it wouldn't be confused with October.

Who are our gods today? We have to name one of the new months, Baraktober. Maybe month one. Month two Jacksonary for Michael? Those two probably have had the most air play lately, but who else. I'll leave it to you guys. You have 10 more months to name....