Week 13 Storytelling: Celebrating Friday

A long long time ago there were no names for the days of the week. People wandered around hardly bound by time. This proved to be a good thing as well as a bad thing. People enjoyed not having hard deadlines for things but this brought about laziness and neglect.

The biggest city in the world at the time was called Origin and it was here that the idea of a week was born. In order to better govern the people of the world they decided creating a bigger presence of time was a good idea. One of the ways they thought they could do this was by creating a calendar that consisted of days, weeks, and months. There were to be 7 days in a week, 4 weeks in a month, and 12 months in what they called a year.

15th Century Calendar
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This proved to be a good idea and a lot of people felt like this would help progress society and the world they lived in. Some of the highly educated people had noticed that there wasn't a lot of motivation amongst people before they put in place a calendar. However, afterwards, those intellectuals noticed the pace of life increase and the growth of society to increase faster. They felt pleased with themselves.

The only problem they had was that people didn't know how to differentiate one day of the week versus another. The intellectuals decided that they should name the days of the week to help people in their organization.

There were five different intellectuals that decided they would go to a local tavern on the fifth day of the week and name the days of the week. They thought this would be a fun way to get creative in coming up with names suitable for the week days.

They all agreed the each of the names of the day should end with day. When it came to the fifth day everyone got excited because this was the last day of the work week for them. They were all teachers and the students had the sixth and seventh days of the week off.

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After much deliberation they all agreed on the name for the fifth day. They decided to call it Friday. The chose this because in their accent fri sounded like free. When school would get out on Friday and all the kids had left the teachers would walk out of the building together and shout WE ARE FREEEE! This had been there ritual for a long time so they thought it only fitting to use it as the name of the fifth day.

Author's Note.
In the original story there is a woman that decides she is going to comb and spin flax on a Friday. I think this is the type of work she does. Apparently this is upsetting to Mother Friday because she comes to the house of the lady when she has fallen asleep. Mother Friday is engaged that the lady would be doing such a thing and takes dust and dumps it all in the woman's eyes. The woman wakes up screaming and not knowing what happened. In the end the woman begs for forgiveness and Mother Friday eventually removes the dust so the lady can see again.
The story inspired me to do a story about the origin of the Friday weekday. I thought it would be funny to have there be a lighthearted story behind it because Friday is such a great day of the week for most people. I think ancient history can kind of be presented as a period of time where the people were more serious than lighthearted. I wanted more story to kind of change that attitude about that time period.

Bibliography.
Friday, Russian Fairy Tales, W. R. S. Ralston, 1887.