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