Speaker 1: Welcome to How Stuff Works. Now. I'm your host, Lauren Vogelbaum,
Speaker 1: a researcher and writer. Here at How Stuff Works. Every
Speaker 1: week I'm bringing you three stories from our team about
Speaker 1: the weird and wondrous advances we've seen in science, technology,
Speaker 1: and culture. Except when I know this week we've got
Speaker 1: to because holiday production scheduling is hilarious. One of them
Speaker 1: is something of a p s A. If you want
Speaker 1: six to be over as quickly as possible, I've got
Speaker 1: bad news. Beyond feeling longer, it's going to literally be
Speaker 1: longer than most years. But first, I've got a historical
Speaker 1: story for you, with thanks to our freelance writer John Donovan.
Speaker 1: Here in the United States, Christmas is a national holiday,
Speaker 1: and with the holiday season in full aggressive swing, it's
Speaker 1: easy to imagine that it's always been this way. But
Speaker 1: for hundreds of years, the Puritans actually said bah humbug
Speaker 1: to Christmas. When the maf Or landed at what is
Speaker 1: now Cape Cod, Massachusetts in sixteen twenty, the pilgrims brought
Speaker 1: more than just literal baggage. They were aiming, of course,
Speaker 1: to establish a new way of life in the New World.
Speaker 1: One thing the Puritans wanted to leave behind. Christmas. In England,
Speaker 1: as in much of Europe, Christmas was rife with unbridled partying.
Speaker 1: The harvests were over, the cattle were slaughtered so they
Speaker 1: wouldn't need to be fed throughout the winter. That made
Speaker 1: fresh meat and fresh booze plentiful, as well as the
Speaker 1: time to eat, drink and carry on. Puritans didn't buy
Speaker 1: into the idea of Christmas. The Bible notes no date
Speaker 1: for Jesus birth. In the Puritan mind, therefore, there was
Speaker 1: nothing to celebrate. According to Dr Penny Ristad, author of
Speaker 1: Christmas in America, a History, the Christmas season in England
Speaker 1: had become a time of excess feasting, gambling, in general debauchery.
Speaker 1: The Puritans saw it as exemplifying the decline of their
Speaker 1: values in English society, so choosing not to celebrate was
Speaker 1: a way for them to stand firm against what they
Speaker 1: considered a decay of civilization they were so serious about
Speaker 1: treating December twenty five is just another day that everyone
Speaker 1: on the Mayflower, some of whom mind were not Puritans,
Speaker 1: worked on the first Christmas Day that they spent in America.
Speaker 1: The non Puritans in the bunch were not as keen
Speaker 1: on the ban on Christmas, rastad says it wasn't long
Speaker 1: before they started acting out, refusing to work and taking
Speaker 1: to the streets to play games and generally frolic. William Bradford,
Speaker 1: an English separatist and early governor of Plymouth Colony, didn't
Speaker 1: penalize anyone for it, but he did tell them to
Speaker 1: take all that foul partying indoors on the idea that
Speaker 1: it said a bad tone. Not all of America was
Speaker 1: so against the idea of celebrating Christmas, though settlements in
Speaker 1: the southern part of America, like the one in Jamestown, Virginia,
Speaker 1: let loose, but the Puritans kept a stranglehold on fun
Speaker 1: in New England, even if the band was never completely successful.
Speaker 1: According to Stephen Nissenbaum, the author of The Battle for Christmas,
Speaker 1: maritime communities hosting fishermen and sailors like marble Head were
Speaker 1: steadfast about keeping their Christmas traditions and other English folk practices,
Speaker 1: and drinking in sex habits. The Puritan population considered these
Speaker 1: communities to be made up of encourageable sinners and would
Speaker 1: maintain their disdain for Christmas for decades. Though there was
Speaker 1: a similar movement. In England, for a while, Christmas was
Speaker 1: outlawed with an Act of Parliament in sixteen forty four
Speaker 1: that was enforced by political and military leader Oliver Cromwell.
Speaker 1: In America, things became so stringent that between sixteen fifty
Speaker 1: nine and sixteen eighty one, anyone in Boston caught celebrating
Speaker 1: Christmas was subject to a five shilling fine. A changing society, though,
Speaker 1: would not be denied. Here's a passage from Christmas in America.
Speaker 1: A history in the end. Whether slowly in New England
Speaker 1: or more rapidly in the Middle Colonies and the South,
Speaker 1: the forces of pluralism and the need for social harmony
Speaker 1: shaped and encouraged Christmas celebration, Yet its status as a
Speaker 1: holiday remained haphazard and varied widely. It would take the
Speaker 1: project of nation building in the wake of the Revolution
Speaker 1: to begin to define an American conception of Christmas. Even
Speaker 1: after the colonies united and became a nation, years passed
Speaker 1: before Christmas became the holiday we know it as today.
Speaker 1: Congress was in session on Christmas Day in seventeen eighty nine,
Speaker 1: the year after the Constitution was ratified. The Senate worked
Speaker 1: on Christmas Day in seventeen ninety seven, and the House
Speaker 1: met on Christmas Day in eighteen o two. Christmas wouldn't
Speaker 1: begin to take its present form until later in the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century. Different religions and denominations, Protestants and Catholics among them,
Speaker 1: emerged in America, and they held Christmas as both a
Speaker 1: holy day and a day of celebration. The Puritans noticed
Speaker 1: and started to move away from their insistence on their
Speaker 1: neighbors conforming to their own way of thinking. People of
Speaker 1: different religions formed local governments, and trade between various networks
Speaker 1: helped calm the antipapies between the factions. As the New
Speaker 1: World prospered and a middle class was born, the idea
Speaker 1: of giving and receiving Christmas gifts took hold. An emphasis
Speaker 1: on home and family followed away from the frolicking in
Speaker 1: the streets and the mail centered celebrations involving drinking, feasting,
Speaker 1: and sex. Finally, in eighteen seventy, two hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: years after Puritans landed at Plymouth and put the queeze
Speaker 1: on the idea of Christmas as a celebration, the US
Speaker 1: declared Christmas and national holiday. Ever since, celebrations big and
Speaker 1: small secular and non secular marked the day, and finally,
Speaker 1: this week, Stuff editor Christopher Hassiotis and freelance writer Patrick J.
Speaker 1: Keiger explain why is a long year technically long just
Speaker 1: by an extra second. I hope my teaser at the
Speaker 1: top wasn't too click beatty, listen, beatty, take it away, Christopher.
Speaker 1: There's a lot to say goodbye to as two thousand
Speaker 1: sixteen comes to a close. The deaths of great artists,
Speaker 1: countless global tragedies, an acrimonious US presidential campaign, and many
Speaker 1: other events have made many of us eager to get
Speaker 1: the seemingly interminable mastiness over with once and for all.
Speaker 1: But thanks to the precision of modern timekeeping, we'll have
Speaker 1: to wait one additional second on New Year's Eve before
Speaker 1: we can welcome a hopefully better two thousand seven teen.
Speaker 1: The additional unit of time, known as a leap second,
Speaker 1: gets officially inserted precisely one second before midnight strikes on Saturday,
Speaker 1: December thirty one at England's Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Since
Speaker 1: eighty four, that's been the location of the prime meridian
Speaker 1: for Greenwich meantime, also known as coordinated Universal time and
Speaker 1: that's what sets the standard for the rest of the
Speaker 1: world's time zones. So why is this really necessary. Well,
Speaker 1: for most of history, people use the Earth itself as
Speaker 1: a giant clock under the assumption that it always rotated
Speaker 1: at the same precise speed, and we were unaware of
Speaker 1: the accompanying global wobble we now know about. But with
Speaker 1: a development in the nineteen forties of the first atomic clock,
Speaker 1: which used the vibration of the caesium atom to measure
Speaker 1: units of time very very very very precisely, it became
Speaker 1: apparent that Earth isn't all that dependable of a clock
Speaker 1: when you're talking millions and billions of years. That's because
Speaker 1: the planet's rotation is very very very slowly decreasing by
Speaker 1: about point zero zero two seconds per day. That means
Speaker 1: that every eighteen months or so, Earth loses about one
Speaker 1: second of time. On the other hand, atomic clocks like
Speaker 1: the ones we've been using, typically lose about a billionth
Speaker 1: of one second per day. That discrepancy between atomic clocks
Speaker 1: and the Earth results in some complications, minor as they
Speaker 1: may be, because we still use our planet's rotation as
Speaker 1: the basis for the calendar. To compensate for the slight
Speaker 1: irregularity between systems. A United Nations agency called the International
Speaker 1: Telecommunications Union adds one single second to Coordinated Universal Time
Speaker 1: every so often, just to even things out and make
Speaker 1: sure we're still okay. Think of this as a miniature,
Speaker 1: miniature version of why we add a twenty ninth day
Speaker 1: to February every four years. In fact, this isn't the
Speaker 1: first time a so called leap second has been added
Speaker 1: to a year. We've done so twenty seven times ever
Speaker 1: since nineteen although we always do it on either a
Speaker 1: June December thirty one. And if you're already planning to
Speaker 1: be that person at the party who's a know it
Speaker 1: all insisting on ushering in two thousand seventeen by counting
Speaker 1: down ten nine, eight, seven, six, five, four three two
Speaker 1: one extra one, Hey, now not so fast. The extra
Speaker 1: second shows up right before midnight only in the time
Speaker 1: zone home to Greenwich. That means, if you're celebrating on
Speaker 1: Eastern Standard Time in the United States, for instance, that
Speaker 1: extra second gets added right US PM is about to
Speaker 1: take over to seven PM. Planning to party in say
Speaker 1: South Korea instead, that means your extra second gets added
Speaker 1: right before nine am on New Year's day so you
Speaker 1: can come into work a little late. That's our show
Speaker 1: for this week. Thank you so much for tuning in,
Speaker 1: and hey, happy holidays, whatever and however you celebrate from
Speaker 1: our family to yours. Part of that family I should
Speaker 1: mention is our audio producer, Dylan Fagan and our editorial
Speaker 1: liaise On Alison Ludermilk. Subscribed to now now for more
Speaker 1: of the latest science news and this links to anything
Speaker 1: you'd like to hear his cover plus the name of
Speaker 1: your favorite holiday related movie or TV episode. Mine is
Speaker 1: die Hard. You can send us an email at now
Speaker 1: podcast at how stuff works dot com, and of course
Speaker 1: for lots more stories like these, head on overy to
Speaker 1: our home planet now dot how stuff works dot com