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Standard Mersian Calendar
The Standard Mersian Calendar is the annual solar calendar used to track the passage of days in a Mersian year.
A year on Mersia is 512.153 days. Usually, the Calendar will consist of 512 days, but once every seven years, a “Spare Day” is added to make up for calendar drift, and years which have a “Spare Day” added are known as “Spare Years”. Because the fraction of a day is not exactly one seventh, once every fourteen “Spare Years” approximately once per century, “Spare Day” is skipped in order to re-align the calendar with the true solar year. In spare years, the extra day is the first day of the year, which is not formally part of any month or week. It is, in most cultures, treated as simply an extra day to celebrate the new year.
The standard calendar is positioned such that the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere falls on the first day of the new year. Spare day will fall on the solstice in spare years.
Subdivision
The Standard Calendar is divided into sixteen months, each of which contains four weeks, each of which contains eight days.
Months and Days are named, weeks however are usually unnamed.
Months
There are sixteen months in the Standard Calendar. There are four months in each season.
Winter months:
Vernal months:
Summer months:
Autumn months:
Weeks
A Mersian week is eight days long, and consists of four segments.
A "weekend" consisting of two days:
A "first stretch" consisting of three days:
A "rest day" consisting of one day:
A "second stretch" consisting of two days:
Weekdays as they relate to business operations
Most businesses either close or have reduced staff on weekends and the rest day, whereas the first and second stretches are considered business days, and most businesses will be fully operational on these days.
The “first stretch” is nearly universally reserved for customer-facing operations. Virtually every store's doors will be open from Roday through Tulday.
The “second stretch” is used by some businesses for internal operations like infrastructure repair, scheduled outages, re-stocking, inventory, during which time they will be closed to the public.
Some people take a rest day on Tulday or Yenday instead of Durimday. Some places only close on the established weekend of Etsday and Ixday.
Calendars In the Home
Because the week is perfectly evenly divisible by the number of days, and spare days are never assigned a weekday, a home will usually use the same calendar for years or even decades, changing only the year, which some calendars include different interchangeable numerals to facilitate.
Calendars on Mersia are most often ornate wooden plaques with small pegs arranged in sixteen rectangular groupings of four columns of eight rows each. Some calendars are painted with imagery relating to the season each month takes place in, or relating to holidays that take place during that month. Days relating to recognized holidays will usually have the pegs for those days colored differently to set them apart.
A good calendar is considered furniture, and most households will look to a local craftsperson to make their calendar. Store bought calendars do exist, but they're considered cheap or gaudy, and generally looked down on.
Usage
Once in the home, a small ring is put on the current day's peg. Once a day, the ring is moved to the next peg. Calendars are arranged with Etsday on the top of each column, and Yenday on the bottom.
Days significant to a household, such as anniversaries or birthdays, will either have that peg painted to set it apart, or a small colored band may be slipped over it.
Some people use the same calendar ring every year, while others might get a new ring ever year. Some calendars have a longer vertical metal rail protruding from the side where each calendar year, that year's ring is added to the rail.