The idea
Ornellember was born from a late-night tweet. The principle is hardly original, especially considering that the International Fixed Calendar proposal is nearly 150 years old. I gave it the name ornellember because I was asked what to name the 13th month and that was the first and silliest thing that came to mind – but I had already decided to use letters for month names by that point.
ornellember is a joke date format based on the International Fixed Calendar. It comprises 13 months that are each 28 days in length, except month 13 (known as M), which contains 29 days on normal years and 30 days on leap years.
Previous proposals for the International Fixed Calendar had assumed that the months would conserve the same names, but this format proposes a new paradigm: each month is referred to by its corresponding letter in the Latin alphabet (A-M). This makes translation easier. Holidays
The 29th of M is called N – which is the next alphabetical letter, but also stands for New. N is the day where all humans can usher in the new year, and breathe in the air of renewal.
Every 4 years, we have the 30th of M, which is called O. Again, O is the next alphabetical letter after N, but more importantly, it stands for Ornellember Day! O is the most special calendar holiday of all. It reminds us of the cyclical nature of life, and of the arbitrary nature of calendars. Origins
I created a calendar view over the summer of 2022 that lists months of Ornellember and their equivalent in gregorian year.
Check it out
- Code for the calendar: Gist on GitHub
Making it
The main part of clarifying details came when I was writing the Ornellember NPM package. I’m a big fan of vanilla JS, but I have to say I missed TypeScript while writing the calendar view. Additionally, it did feel a bit clunky to do DOM manipulation in for loops. But overall, I’m happy with the speed and the result.
Next steps
I’d love to make a website for Ornellember, and popularize it a bit, especially since I’ve for the first time found it really useful in my own life: it’s a much better fit to track menstrual cycles than the Gregorian calendar.