An Honest Serpent Devours Time

The Entropic holidays are the days when the Inultaru celebrate specific events during the Procession of Entropy, which proceeds from the middle of October through the last day of December. Today is the holiday known as Twelve-Eleven or the Eve of the Last Twenty or Dwarfstone Day. It commemorates in advance that moment when our sun will finally blow out and shrink down into a small blue jewel that jackalopes call a dwarfstone. Or maybe a dwarfgem? There is some confusion in the translation; I prefer dwarfstone, but I know there are people who will insist on dwarfgem.

(We can all agree that you definitely do not want to call it a swartstone or swartgem. That translation can only be found in Bidot’s Field Guide to Inultarumek Grammars and Vocabularies, a book that you should ignore or burn because Louis Randolph Bidot was a xenophobic misogynistic hoonyuffalp*.)

Dwarfstone Day is one of the holidays that I left out of the Official 2022 Geranium Lake Propeties Calendar, which was my second attempt to include Jackalopian holidays in a GLP calendar. I did not attempt to do that for the 2024 calendars, and I think I will probably never try again. I discovered that my casual knowledge of astronomy, astrology and alchemy is not sufficient for sorting out the complexities of a true Inultarumet calendar, and my knowledge of the history of Jackalopian holidays is woefully incomplete. Plus I was not born with a jackalope’s instinctive affinity for the planet Mars; jackalopes always know where to find Mars in the night sky.

On the back of the artwork for the GLP comic I posted on December 8th, Yost had written a list of dates, arranged in two groups of four:

1 – 4 – 91
7 – 22 – 91
1 – 22 – 92
6 – 16 – 92

11 – 21 – 92
6 – 8 – 93
12 – 8 – 93 *
5 – 4 – 94

By coincidence, I was familiar with the way the dates were arranged, because two years ago I had made my own list:

Spring Equinox – Feb 07 2021
Summer Solstice – Aug 25 2021
Autumn equinox – Feb 24 2022
Winter Solstice – Jul 21 2022

Spring Equinox – Dec 26 2022
Summer Solstice – Jul 12 2023
Autumn equinox – Jan 12 2024
Winter Solstice – Jun 07 2024

These are the Earth dates for the first days of the four seasons on Mars.

With the intention to add a note of irony to today’s post, I lifted the title from Bidot’s dubious translation of this well=known line, Amkeylan tanna ballakveydi annumoorisso dis leydi, from “Sway Towards the Horizon”, a hymn from the Book of Common Procession Prayers. The correct translation is “The white snake bites its own tail fated forever” or “The lindworm bites its own tail destined forever”.

I am including coloring pages for the masks from both parts of “Seasons Beastlings”. Remember to be polite if a wish demon appears after you finish coloring your mask.

*A slang word that is so rude and so ridiculous that it defies translation. If you have conversed with the spalpeens and mudlarks of the To-inen-wa clan, you are probably cognizant of the gist.

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