The new year is upon us, but thanks to a feature of the Gregorian calendar, what’s old may be new again and the past present, as the grids repeat periodically.
Save for leap years, the grids usually repeat in six- and 11-year intervals, offering avid collector — or forgetful recycler — a chance to reuse old calendars, or a chance to revisit years past, as The Columbian has done several times over the past years.
They’re also a fun way to decorate, said Cyrilla Gleason, pointing to the elaborate illustrations and blocks of flowery text in an American history-themed 1945 calendar she used for 2018.
Her mother and grandmother would keep theirs, she said, and she’s amassed a nice collection of old and reusable calendars.
“I have one in every room of my house,” she said. Many are church calendars, or calendars from funeral homes, which would give out calendars each year, she said.
The collection shows, in part, the evolution of the form, from calendars with simple bindings held up by a string, filled with text and illustrations, to glossy, spiral-bound calendars with full-size photo prints.
A calendar should match if it starts on the same day as another year, Gleason said, and the year has the same number of days. The patterns don’t hold for all holidays, as they might be based on a lunar calendar.
The year 2019’s closest corollary calendar is 2013’s, when The Columbian’s top story was the all-but-death of the Columbia River Crossing plan, as the Washington Legislature declined to include it in the state budget. (The project’s offices didn’t close down until 2014.)
The year 2013 also saw the death of Nelson Mandela; the election of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina as the 266th pope, whereupon he took the name Francis; and the revelation, via whistleblower Edward Snowden, of the NSA’s blanket surveillance of American citizens.
And what parent of young children can forget that 2013 saw the release of Disney’s “Frozen”?
Dig back a little further, to 1991, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union or the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Missing that one? Try the 1974 calendar, and recall the resignation of Richard Nixon, rewatch the Rumble in the Jungle boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, and reminisce on the way we were with Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were,” that year’s No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
For an even deeper calendar cut, carefully crack open and delicately rehang 1907’s calendar, which was, fittingly, the first year of the “ball drop” in New York City’s Times Square.
