An autumnal month without holidays

This morning, my wife commented that the public holidays in Taiwan are very unevenly distributed this year. Starting tomorrow, we have our fourth long weekend in a five-week period (Confucius's birthday, Moon Festival, the anniversary of the Wuchang Uprising, and now Taiwan Retrocession Day), but then in November there will be no holidays at all.

During my lunch break, I decided I should give Chelmaxioms a proper read (I've never read the whole thing), so I started at the beginning, with "The Preface of the Hoarse Savant." Near the end of this brief preface, I read this paragraph:

I spoke of the destruction of Chelm. That destruction seals a sense of absence into the Hebrew month of Heshvan, the autumnal month called "mar" Heshvan, "bitter" Heshvan, because no feast days fall within its span. But even the Heshvan of deprivation, the void in the calendar, cannot obliterate the plenitude of that Exile, the seldom silenced talk that lies behind these maxioms: cantilena, lied, song, sonatina, chant.

An autumnal month with no feast days? We had just been talking about that. Wondering how closely Heshvan might correspond with November this year, I looked it up. It turns out that it starts today. October 23, 2025 on the Gregorian calendar corresponds to the Hebrew date 1 Cheshvan 5786.

(The same Hebrew sound can be transliterated as either h or ch. Chelm itself is often rendered Helm.)