One of my New Year’s resolutions was to learn to spell the word calendar.

Yes.  Yes, thank you, Amazon.com, I did mean calendars.  I have two more days to learn it, so BACK OFF.

Choosing the New Calendar is fun enough for me that I start thinking of it with pleasant anticipation BEFORE Christmas, as in “Soon Christmas will be over and I can choose the new calendar!”  I go to a big bookstore like Barnes & Noble, and I go through all the calendars and choose a likely armful, usually about ten.  Then I find a quiet place to dither.

I try to choose the one that MOST APPEALS, which sounds duh but it’s hard not to get distracted by what I think I SHOULD or SHOULDNT like.  It doesn’t make any sense for me to get a calendar of pigs or of high heeled shoes or of rabbits, as if I had some sort of special interest in those things, but if I like it best, it’s what I should get.  Or, this year I found a bird calendar I really liked, and it was exactly what I’d had in mind so I felt like I should get it.  But what appealed most was the Charley Hopper calendar (even though it was the last one and the corner was kind of bent) so that’s what I got.

Others I considered:

Linda Nelson Stocks Folk Art calendar.  I am not even a folk art kind of girl, but the calendars appeal to me.  I think it’s because there’s so much to look at in each picture.  It seems like even at the end of a month I’d still be noticing new details.  Also, folk art tends to be sweet and simple in a way I find calming.

Hello Kitty calendar.  I get this one every year for Elizabeth’s room.

Foxes calendar.  My surname in its original language means something about foxes, so I’m drawn to them.  But when I was looking at the back of the calendar, I thought I probably wasn’t enough drawn to them in a “looking at twelve different fox calendar pages this year” kind of way.

A Walk in London calendar.  Every year I consider one of these—London, Paris, French countryside, New York, Ireland, Rome, whatever.  Every year I don’t buy it.

Nuns Having Fun calendar.  This is another I consider each year but so far have never chosen.

Burpee Art From the Garden calendar.  Like vintage seed packets.  This was the runner-up this year; I think I decided against it mostly because it seemed too similar to the calendar I had this year.

Uglydoll calendar.  I’m still wondering if I should have gotten this one, but it didn’t have little pictures on the back of sample months, so I couldn’t tell if I’d like it or not.

Cats in Hats calendar.

Domo calendar.  My 3rd-grader wants this one so badly.

The Calendar Calendar.  I didn’t actually consider it, but I do like the cover.

I find daily-page calendars stressful:  I never seem to be able to keep UP with them, and they’re not helpful for the “remembering things for me” function I use a wall calendar for.  I did buy a Sudoku page-a-day calendar last year when calendars were down to $1, but I use it as a Sudoku BOOK and not as a calendar at all.

HOWEVER.  If this calendar were available for any kind of reasonable price, which it is not, I would buy it:

The Niggli Colour Calendar.  It’s a different color per day.  Just a color.  Not a word to learn or a puzzle to do or an inspirational quote to internalize—just a color.  I don’t know why I want this, I just DO.

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