The approaching holiday season lends itself to some odd thoughts.  Our modern calendar is great.  A calendar year is only offset from the orbit of the Earth by about 6 hours.  It has tremendous advantages over more ancient methods.  Apparently in Ancient Rome, it was considered a major achievement to get the calendar to line up with the seasons, even if that required adding months named after oneself.

With our modern calendar, holidays come very reliably on the dates that we can expect.  One can plan ahead.  The irony is that we have, in some cases, slightly detached the holidays from the astronomical and agricultural events that were bein celebrated such as the vernal equinox (Passover/Easter), summer solstice (Midsummer), autumnal equinoz (Sukkoth), the end of the harvest (Halloween/Samhain), and, everyone's favorite, the winter solstice (Christmas/Hannukah/Yule/Saturnalia/Dies Natalis Sois Invicti).

Our modern calendar has sacrificed some of is accuracy for better precision.

You do have to love what it says about humans that we through our biggest party for the darkest day of the year.