Calendar Systems

Hi all,

I'm trying to create an interesting calendar system for the Xinkutlan
culture- something totally unrelated to the standard Julian/Gregorian
model.  I'm passingly familiar with some of the Ancient Near Eastern
calendars (Egyptian & Hebrew mostly, though I think I've some notes on the
Babylonian system somewhere...), and I've had a brief look at the Maya
calendar system, but I thought I'd put the question out there and see what
others have done.

So:

How do you arrange your calendar (assuming it's a non-standard one)?
Is it solar or lunar?  If you have no moon, or multiple moons, how does
that affect the calendar system?  If you have a lunar calendar, do you have
any way of tying it in to the (solar) agricultural year?
What about leap years?  There are various ways of doing this, too:  the
Hebrew calendar, IIRC, added a whole repeat month once every 4 years.

What do you call your months?
What about days of the week?  Do you name them after deities, have a "first
day, second day" system like Russian, name them after typical household
events ("washing-day, mending-day"...), what?

Do you have any multiple-year cycles, like the Chinese (& Central Asian)
animal cycle?  How does that work?

Any information you could give me will broaden the possibilities- I'm
curious as to what others have done.

Geoff

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