Calendar Rituals

On the first day of a new month, I turn the pages of our calendars. To the left of the kitchen sink, for instance, on a small section perpendicular to the cupboards, there is our main calendar for the year, on which we note all sorts of things. This year, it is from Flame Tree Publishing, featuring gorgeous illustrations by Eric Ravilious (1903–1942) from the Victoria and Albert Collections in London. We first had one of these for 2024, and Wendy and I both loved it; I hope there will be yet another set of images for 2026. 

Until about four years ago, one of our rituals at the end of a year was to go through the main calendar for the year to come, filling in various noteworthy dates (birthdays, deaths, family visits, conferences, other planned trips, and so on). Wendy always took charge of this, with gusto—not least in adding elements of the church calendar beyond the minimal provision usually supplied. Alas, it became too much for her.

To the right of the sink, on the door to the basement (where the washer and dryer are often humming, and where there are also many, many books), there is a perpetual calendar from Sweden, tall and narrow in format, featuring the art of Elsa Beskow (1874–1953). We got this calendar ages ago, before we moved from Pasadena to Wheaton in 1994; on its pages, Wendy marked birthdays, baptisms, and other milestones in the lives of people dear to us.

In the family room, we typically have at least two and sometimes three calendars on the same wall. This year there are two. On the left, from a website called Baseball History Comes Alive, there is a gorgeously produced and information-rich calendar featuring “Vintage Baseball Cards”; one player is highlighted each month, and the selection includes figures long forgotten along with stars from the Hall of Fame. On the right, there is a Paul Klee calendar from the Retrospect Group, notable for a selection of images that have not been endlessly reproduced over the years.

For three years (2020–2022), we had three calendars in that space: each month, there was a collage-poem by Herta Müller featuring an image that she juxtaposed with the text. The format was gigantic. At the bottom of each page, the dates of the month appeared in small type. I can’t read German (I had one year of it in college, which helps a little bit), but I would plug each month’s poem into Google Translate (and occasionally I would pick the brains of a friend who does know German). I still go back to those occasionally.

In our bedroom upstairs, Wendy and I have two calendars: One is another perpetual calendar, which we acquired in 2002, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the images, all featuring cats, are by the French artist Théophile Alexandre Steinlen (1859–1923). It overlaps to some extent with the one downstairs, but on its pages over the years Wendy has recorded more recent milestones, including the birthdays of our seven grandchildren. And speaking of the grandkids, they star in the other calendar we have in our bedroom, which also features our daughter Mary and our son-in-law John: Each year, Mary (with help from the kids) puts together a new selection of photos that give us glimpses into their lives. When Wendy was in rehab very recently after a bad fall, our eldest, Anna, who came out from Montana to help (using up all of her accumulated days of paid leave), took the 2025 calendar featuring Mary and John and the grandkids to install in Wendy’s room. Our daughter Katy, whose room is on the level between the first floor and ours, is much more attuned to the digital world than we are, and thus uses a digital calendar, but she does join in picking out some of the calendars downstairs, such as “The Lakota Way,” which served as our main calendar for 2023 (we’ve saved that one, of course); for eight years, Katy was a houseparent at St. Joseph’s Indian School in Chamberlain, South Dakota, where we visited a number of times.

Nowadays, at the start of a month, I often feel a momentary sense of disorientation. June 2025. Wait—2025? How did we get here? But the order undergirding the calendar is one we can trust—as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever.