Calendars That Start With Monday

When I was in first grade, we learned the days of the week. I think there was some horribly sappy little song to go along with it, but I've blocked that memory.

But what I remember clearly was that Sunday was the first day of the week. The vast majority of wall-hanging calendars I have dealt with over the years list Sunday as the first day of the week.

So, when I'm working on writing for this blog and I hit the "Schedule" button to the right, I keep trying to schedule posts for Saturday, because the Blogger calendar isn't configurable and starts with Monday. I've also scheduled New American Things posts for Fridays and Talking Game posts for Thursdays. All of which required a great deal of correction and panic once discovered.

I don't know if it's this way in other countries or not.  Here in the US, it's a holdover from our Judeo-Christian heritage.  After creating the Earth and everything on it, God took a day off. The seventh day, or Sabbath.

If you ask someone of the Jewish faith what day they take off, it's Saturday. Saturday is the seventh day on their calendars. The Fourth Commandment was to take the day off. So they do.

In fact, Sunday is the first day of the week for Christian, Jewish, and Islamic calendars. It didn't start to shift from first to last until fairly recently.

ISO 8601 standardized the calendar for ... well, people who worry about ISO documentation. Mostly computer-oriented folks and economists and other "detail-oriented" folks, but it's been gradually trickling down. ISO 8601 set Monday as the first day of the week.

This has the result of more and more calendars shifting Sunday to the end of the week on the calendars, which is why - every so often - one of my posts here will go up on Saturday instead of Friday.

I'm not an ISO adherent, and I very much dislike the Blogger scheduler that forces Monday to be the first day of the week, without the ability to configure it.