In 1582, as the Catholic world prepared to adopt the new Gregorian calendar, German pamphleteers lampooned the strife that attended the change:

The old calendar must be the right one for the animals still use it. The stork flies away according to it, the bear comes out of his hole on the Candlemas day of the old calendar and not of the Pope’s, and the cattle stand up in their stalls to honor the birth of the Lord on the Christmas night of the old and not of the new calendar. They also recognize in this work diabolical wickedness. The Pope was afraid the last day would come too quickly. He has made his new calendar so that Christ will get confused and not know when to come for the last judgment, and the Pope will be able to continue his knavery still longer. May Gott him punish.

“Inanimate objects were not so stubborn.” An Italian walnut tree that had reliably put forth leaves, nuts, and blossoms on the night before Saint John’s day under the old regime dutifully adopted the new calendar and performed its feat on the correct day in 1583. A traveler wrote, “I have today sent a branch, broken off on Saint John’s day, to Herr von Dietrichstein, who no doubt will show it to the Kaiser.”

(Roscoe Lamont, “The Reform of the Julian Calendar,” Popular Astronomy 28:1 [January 1920], 18-32.)