Soundtrack in my head: Dif Juz, “A Starting Point”

This is my first Ayyam-i-ha as a Baha'i. Yay! Eh?  I hope my Baha'i readers will indulge me as I explain this phenomenon to my non-Baha'i friends.

Ayyam-i-ha is not exactly a Baha'i holiday. It’s not really a set of holy days, but a prelude to what might, in a manner of speaking, be considered a holy month. It’s a time of celebration, gift-giving and charitable works, but it’s not Christmas or even the birthday of a holy figure. The four or five days don’t even belong to any specific month of the Baha'i calendar—that’s kind of the point.

The Baha'i calendar has nineteen months of nineteen days each. Nineteen times nineteen is 361. But since the Baha'i calendar is a solar calendar with 365 days a year except for 366 in a leap year, we have four or five extra days that we need to figure out what to do with.

Rather than make have some months be longer than others as they do in the Gregorian calendar, the Baha'i calendar keeps all months at nineteen days, and inserts four or five extra days between the eighteenth and nineteenth month of the year, referred to as Ayyam-i-ha or the Intercalary Days. One advantage is that people won’t have to memorize a rhyme that might go something like this: “Twenty days hath Azamat…Izzat, Rahmat, and Mashiyyat. All the rest have nineteen except, um, um...”

I intend to have a post later on about how much geek-fascination I have with the Baha'i calendar, but for now, let me just explain that Ayyam-i-ha seems to serve as a nice prelude to the last month of Ala, which is a month of fasting for the Baha’is. Ala, in turn, is the last month of the Baha'i calendar, leading to the new year, which occurs at the spring equinox.

I learned long ago that Ayyam-i-ha is pronounced “Aye-ya-me-ha,” instead of “Ay-um-eeee-haaa.” But I only learned just this past weekend that the Intercalary Days are pronounced “Inter-cuh-LARRY,” instead of “Inter-Calorie”—in my strange mind, the latter pronunciation would have seemed appropriate for a period of time leading up to a fast.

Alas, I will not able to observe the Fast during Ala. My doctor recommended against it due to my metabolism issues. In some ways, I think I’ve already been fasting—starting in mid-January I went on a diet to avoid almost all grains because grains seem to create problems for my digestion. I feel a lot better as a result. (More on that in another post, too.)

But I can definitely feel a little magic in the air during these five days of Ayyam-i-ha. Last weekend, we had a nice little celebration for children and adults at the Baha'i Center here in Madison and I was surprised at how much it lifted my spirits. I think the cute little video below from the Baha'i National Center gives kind of a nice taste of the spirit of the season…