The Year the Calendars Ended

Was 1 January 2013 was some kind of unrecognized cultural watershed, like “The Year Frenchmen Stopped Wearing Berets” or something?

Image from the “Year and a Day” calendar.

I took my 2012 Reed College alumni association calendar off the wall and realized that I had nothing to replace it with — not one free calendar.

Not another from Reed, nor Trout Unlimited, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, nor any other organization. Maybe I have not been sending them enough money, preferring to donate to local and state-level causes this year. Or maybe this is some spin-off from the over-hyped 12-21-2012 apocalypse.

Despite all the electronic stuff, iCal and whatnot, I still like to be able to look up and see the month at a glance (What day is the 22nd?) without opening an app.

M. had picked up a free calendar at Natural Grocers down in Pueblo, but it hangs in the kitchen, where she can clip the monthly discount coupon.

So I am “buying Pagan,” ordering this year’s Gerald B. Gardner “Year and A Day” calendar, featuring historic photos of Craft figures and a list of Pagan festivals from different cultures in case you need an excuse to lift a glass in honor of Janus, Hathor, or the Vietnamese Parade of the Unicorns. (Parade of the unicorns?)

7 thoughts on “The Year the Calendars Ended

  1. And here is some more strangeness: when I went to buy my wall calendar and desktop calendar book from Petsmart, they only had one cat version of each–all the rest of the calendars were dog calendars (so a dozen plus dog calendars, but only one cat calendar). What is the world coming to?

  2. Medeine Ragana

    My favorite calendar is the Lunaria Lunar Calendar which is put out by Friday Press. It is a true 13-lunar-month calendar and I’ve been getting it since 2008 or so. So what happened to the 2013 calendar? They weren’t putting one out. Well, I was put out about that, but when I emailed them they assured me that there will be one in 2014. I hope! I had to get a regular calendar that had the “glow in the dark” lunar phases on it. Not as good as the Lunaria calendar. Sigh… What IS the world coming to??

  3. Medeine Ragana

    That “Year and a Day” calendar is nice but I wish it started with the New Moon instead of January 1st.

  4. Medeine Ragana

    Oh and the Gardner Calender that talks about a year and a day being 365 days plus one day? I always thought that this was the origin of the “year and a day”: From: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=1006051323950

    “In England, a calendar of thirteen months of 28 days each, plus one extra day day, known as “a year and a day” was still in use up to Tudor times. This would be a hybrid calendar that had substituted regular weeks of seven days for actual quarter-lunations, so that one month had exactly four weeks, regardless of the actual moon phase. The “lunar year” is here considered to have 364 days, resulting in a solar year of “a year and a day”. That is: one lunar year of 364 days plus one day, thus giving a “year and a day”.

    1. Medeine Ragana

      Forgot to add that the idea of “a year and a day” being 366 solar days is strange.

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