With January fast approaching, it’s just about time for people to put up new calendars.
Cyrilla Gleason’s new calendar will be from 1922.
The first day of January will fall on a Sunday in 2017, just as it did in 1922. That means the day-and-date grids for the two calendars pretty much overlap, even though they’re 95 years apart.
The Vancouver woman has a special reason for pulling that calendar from her collection and putting it back up on the wall.
“My mom was born in 1922,” Gleason said.
The family keepsake is among 91 vintage calendars in Gleason’s files. Her collection includes 67 standard calendars and 24 representing leap years.
The oldest goes back more than a century, to 1913.
“I used it 101 years later, in 2014.”
Gleason is the collection’s third-generation custodian.
“My father’s mother, Eleanor Springer, was the one who kept the calendars and gave them to my mother. My mother, Evelyn Borden Springer, then gave the calendars to me,” Gleason said. “I was a young woman when I discovered that an older calendar, with the same starting date as the present calendar, can be used for that present year.”
She does buy one new utilitarian calendar each year so she can pencil in appointments and jot down all of the notes that document her day-to-day life.
Gleason, who has been reusing calendars for more than 30 years, will be putting other pieces of her collection back to work in 2017.
“I enjoy being able to look up and see a calendar wherever I am. I guess it started when I was growing up. My mother had a calendar in nearly every room of our home,” Gleason said.
The 365-day calendar grids (non-leap years) tend to roll around every six or 11 years. Things aren’t always a perfect match. Many religious holidays are determined by the lunar calendar, but that isn’t a problem in 1922/2017. Easter is on Sunday, April 16, in both years.
There will be a disconnect, however, on April 22. You can forget about trying to find Earth Day on a 1922 calendar.
And if the vintage calendars have some years on them, Gleason doesn’t mind.
“It has been interesting to see how artwork and binding of calendars has changed through the years,” she said.
She also acknowledged that the way people plan their days and weeks is changing.
“I’m old-fashioned enough, I like to look at a calendar. My kids look at their phones,” she said. “To me, calendars are unique works of art reflecting our interests, likes and dreams.”
