December 2023 is staring at us from the wall of the alcove just above the telephone table, where yes, we still have a landline phone and a stack of telephone books.
What we don’t have in that corner as we edge towards the middle of January of a new year is a 2024 calendar. This is a new and very disturbing situation for our household, a home planted firmly in past traditions and fighting changes of life with every fibre of our being (a phrase common to Hallmark movies and Harlequin books.)
By Jan. 1 of most new years of the past, we have had our choice from several calendars to decide which one would grace this spot of honour for the next 12 months. This year we haven’t had a choice.
By subscribing to a Saskatchewan-based magazine, we received a lovely calendar as part of the package. It disappeared to the downstairs office as soon as it arrived in the house, despite there being no negotiation or discussion as to whether that was agreeable to the other person in the home. I didn’t argue. Being fair, I had had the pleasure of this calendar for the past year and so it was Housemate’s turn to ogle the photography showing up for each month.
But there were other choices. Often we produced our own calendar to give as Christmas inserts to friends and relatives. Housemate’s photography was the centrepiece of each month. We didn’t produce one this year. Shame on us, in retrospect.
Occasionally we would have received new calendars as Christmas gifts so our wall near the telephone never went empty. In fact, on the morning of Jan. 1 the first chore of the new year was to hang an unblemished calendar on top of the previous year’s edition.
I have often been questioned as to why I would save old calendars. It’s a collection of history and our heritage, a reference as to what we did in March of the previous two or three years, how many doctors’ appointments we attended in a year as compared to say, four years prior. Those calendars are also reminders of birth dates, anniversaries and other pertinent activities.
And businesses that we supported through the year quite frequently provided us with complimentary calendars, a marketing tool to keep their business firmly in our minds. We must have been subpar customers in 2023 as not one of those companies offered us anything to put on our wall.
The youngsters in the crowd would laugh at us gently and suggest that wall calendars are a thing of the past, that modern society has cellphones that offer a calendar tool, an option clutched right there in our hand, or worn in the back pocket of our jeans.
We are aware of this calendar on our phone, but it isn’t on the wall, cannot be seen from several feet away, and offers no guarantee that the battery won’t die right there in the middle of trying to make a medical appointment.
Sooooo, it will be off to the store to find a suitable calendar to hang on the wall. It must be a certain size, have squares for each day, show the numbers in large, bold type, and not have that glossy finish upon which pens have difficulty writing.
I wonder if this year’s calendars are on sale already. Or does one have to wait until June to get a discounted price? I’m ready to pay full price just to have something to hang over December 2023.
Joyce Walter can be reached at ronjoy@sasktel.net
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
