Irish Snakes and a Saint in a Snit

 My illustrations for the 2025 Year of the Snake Useful Calendar are coming along gradually—although I have managed to complete about half of them so far. Here's a look at one.

For March, I wanted to depict Saint Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland, which is, as you may know, total bunk. More on that below.

I looked at several classic depictions of the patron saint of Ireland, including some where he's pointing at some sorry-looking snakes cowering at his feet, but in my sympathy-for-the-snakes mindset, I kept imagining a defiant snake being banished by an authoritarian saint who had had it with their attitude. 

All of which made me think of the Queen of Hearts confronting Alice, who does not look cowed, as illustrated by John Tenniel, when the queen is pointing and yelling, "Off with her head!"

I imagined the saint getting similarly fed up with a sassy Irish snake and its impudence.

The fossil record shows that there never were any snakes in Ireland, and the story that Patrick drove them away first appeared in the 12th century, invented by an English monk named Jocelin of Furness, who also amplified earlier stories about how Patrick slayed Druids by invoking the power of God the Smiter, which had been invented by another hagiographer in the seventh century. Patrick, who lived in the fourth century, was literate and left behind his own story, known as his "Confessio," in which he does not mention Druids or snakes, but I guess that just wasn't exciting enough. 

So my sassy Irish snake is purely a figment of my imagination. But then, the snakes in the traditional depictions of Patrick driving them away can only be figments of those artists' imaginations, too. 

To some modern pagans, the "snakes" are a metaphor for the Druids who, they say, were driven underground or slaughtered by Patrick and his comrades. But there are so many problems with that, beginning with an absence of anything in the historical record associating Irish Druids with snakes either physically or symbolically. As described on the website Irish Central, Druids were more like scholars and keepers of oral tradition than occultists or magicians.

According to Irish Central, St. Patrick and other Christian clerics helped preserve the many oral traditions of the Druids by writing them down. It's because of them that we know anything about the laws, mythologies, and histories established long before Christianity showed up on the island. 

Which means that I am being unfair to the good and probably mild-mannered saint in my depiction of him. But why let a few historical facts get in the way of a good story, right? At least I'm being transparent about the alternative facts here! For more on what can be known about the actual history of St. Patrick and the Druids, read this blog (which cites sources) and this commentary (which calls on many of the same sources). 

"I've had it with your attitude!"

 

A few things I've learned about rabbits and hares

While working on the Useful Calendar, I try to learn as much as I can about the featured animal, which I choose based on the Chinese luni-solar calendar and zodiac. The Year of the Rabbit begins on Jan. 22, 2023, and so I have been immersed in many things rabbit for the last several months.

Naturally, I began by trying to find out what species of rabbits are native to China so I could choose a proper representative for the year. Instead, I learned that there are no rabbits native to China, only hares. That's why the leaping leporid* that graces January in my Year of the Rabbit calendar card is really a hare: Lepus sinensis, the Chinese hare, to be exact. (*Leporid means any rabbit or hare.)

Even though we casually use the words rabbit, hare, and bunny interchangeably, rabbits and hares are distinctly different animals—and bunny is just a nickname often used for rabbits. Both belong to the family Lagomorph, which also includes the pika, an adorable small mammal that is native both to China and North America, and resembles a rabbit in some ways, but has short rounded ears and other distinctions. I did not include any pikas in the 2023 Useful Calendar, but I do plan to include them in the upcoming 2023 Annual: The Rabbit Zine. (And, no, if you're wondering, the pika is not the model for the Pokemon character Pikachu, despite the name, which is apparently coincidental.)

The Chinese zodiac was developed more than 2,000 years ago, in the 5th century BCE, as a way for an illiterate population to keep track of days, months and years. there were definitely no actual rabbits in China at that time. All rabbits in China today are fairly recent descendants of the European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus). 

The European rabbit is the species of all domesticated rabbits, whether for pets, food, fur, or talismans. I remember one time when I was a kid and brought home a lucky rabbit's foot that I had bought with my allowance, thinking it to be the coolest thing, and so soft! My mother eyed it with barely disguised horror at the grotesquery that my little relic really was, and my father said, "It wasn't very lucky for the rabbit, was it?" That certainly gave me something to think about.

In the wild, this is the rabbit species known for its burrowing habit, creating a network of underground tunnels that are extended over generations—a literal rabbit warren. Other species of rabbits, such as the cottontails native to the Americas, will dig shallow depressions for nests, called forms, but are not known for tunneling like the European rabbit.

Rabbits and hares are really fast runners and capable of zig-zagging as they run to evade capture by predators. Depending on which sources you check (and which species of hare), hares can run from 35 mph to 45 mph. Even the eastern cottontail rabbit, which is a lot smaller than a hare, can run 18 mph, and make hairpin turns while doing it. I remember my father describing how, when he was a boy, his dog would be chasing a rabbit at full speed, and suddenly the rabbit would change directions and the dog would wipe out trying to make the same turn. 

The main distinctions between rabbits and hares are that hares are generally bigger, lankier and have longer legs and ears than rabbits; baby hares are called leverets and are born fully furred, eyes open, and ready to run, whereas baby rabbits, called kits, are born naked and blind.  

Jackrabbits are really American hares, so-called because their long ears resemble those of a mule, or jackass. Belgian hares are really a breed of domesticated European rabbit developed to resemble a hare.

Now that the calendar is done and the holiday bustle largely behind me, I look forward to going through my notes, finishing the book about rabbits that I started to read, and returning to the websites and online articles I've bookmarked for "later," to write about the most interesting bits for my rabbit zine.

My Calendar Cat

I was so focused on finishing my 2022 calendar in November that I didn't stop to write any more blog posts about the work in progress as I had intended, so this is more of an afterword to the calendar process.

Although the theme of the 2022 calendar is the Year of the Tiger, as per the Chinese zodiac, I broadened it a bit to include other wild felines, and a few domestic cats, too, specifically my own. Since I went from doing just one calendar illustration a few years ago to doing 12 of them now, I have taken some liberties with the zodiac animal theme to give me a broader range of models. 

I thought I would feature a black cat for October, but I don't have a black cat. However, shortly after our tortoiseshell, Molly, joined our household in 2013, I took a photo of her posing like the cat in those arty "Le Chat Noir" posters, so I decided to use that as my reference and paint her all black. That's the sort of thing one has an artistic license for, after all!

I like to use watercolors, a medium that poses its own unique challenges but appeals to me for a variety of reasons, including that I like working on paper rather than canvas or other surfaces, and because I find the process of learning how to address those very challenges enjoyable.

I decided I needed to work wet-on-wet, that is, painting on wet paper, to evoke the furriness of my subject. There is a trick to it that involves learning to spot when the paper has partially dried just the right amount for the desired effect. If it's too wet, the paint will bleed too much. This is a learning curve for me, as you can see!

One of the beauties of doing paintings to be scanned and placed into a document is that I can tinker with them in Photoshop to fix or change things that aren't working for me. In fact, when I am feeling intimidated about painting the next picture, I tell myself, "It's not Art, it's illustration," and then I relax and get it done. The point is not to disparage my own work, but to remind myself that the raw painting doesn't have to be perfect.

More recently, when Molly was doing that stereotypic cat thing and squeezing herself into a box from a recent delivery, I took a couple of photos, thinking that a cat in a box would make a good December illustration, especially if I added some ribbon and made the box look like a Christmas package (more or less). At first she just stared at me like, "What are you doing?"

Then she obligingly reached a paw out to push something around (she can go crazy over very tiny things, like a dropped coffee bean) and I thought I would try to make it look like she was playing with some scattered ribbon. Although I initially imagined a scene with scattered wrapping paper and ribbons all around, I quickly realized that I would have an easier time completing the illustration if I kept the composition a bit simpler. And it was the last one I needed to finish the calendar, so I didn't want to drag out the process!

You can see how these, and my other illustrations, ended up looking once placed in the calendar here on Etsy.

Sketching Tigers for the 2022 Useful Calendar

Quick sketches with a brush pen help me
loosen up and get a feel for drawing
tigers without overthinking it.

Ever since the LoLa art crawl ended (Sep. 18–19), I have mainly been focused on finishing my 2022 Useful Calendar. It's the Year of the Tiger — beginning Feb. 1, 2022 — and so that is the animal that I will feature on this calendar. Tigers and cats, that is, because I did a whole year of dog illustrations a few years back for the year of the dog, so it only seems right for the upcoming calendar to be all about the cats.

A lot of the work I do in preparation for making my calendar is research, which I commence in the spring and pick away at through the summer — updating all the floating holidays from various faith traditions, and the US holidays that land on a weekend, and new holidays, like Juneteenth in the US, which I've always included, but now that it's an official US holiday, the Monday rule applies, and so the federal observance will be on June 20 next year, because June 19 is a Sunday. 

For many religions, the ones I didn't grow up observing — Baha'i, Buddhism, Hindu, Islam, Judaism, Orthodox Christian — I feel that I need to check a few different sources, because any one source could be wrong. So it actually takes a bit of time, even though I only include the major holidays of these religions; there are many I leave out because only followers of those religions need to know, and they're not counting on me to tell them. But the impetus behind the Useful Calendar is to help people be considerate of one another's cultural and religious traditions when planning events that might affect them.

It's the same reason I always include the date of the Super Bowl — not for football fans, but for the rest of us, who may need to plan around it. 

My sketchbook page is in the middle of the two sources I was
copying and studying, including one with text I can't translate!

But the part I always leave for last are the illustrations. I have been collecting images of tigers and cats on a Pinterest board, and doing light research about these magnificent animals, and a wee bit of sketching, and examining studies of tiger anatomy and interesting facts about them, and really appreciating all the artists on Deviant Art who share their studies, instruction, and photographs on any subject you could want to draw!

But here it is early October and I don't have one finished illustration yet! So it's time to shift from sketching mode to get-serious mode. That includes finding images that photographers give permission to use, such as this German photographer (featured below) who goes by the business name Fotostyle Schindler and asks only that people credit him and provide a link to his Facebook page.

For the next few weeks, tigers and cats are going to be the focus of my attention, at least when I'm at home in my studio. I may even pay a visit to the Minnesota Zoo to see a real live tiger.

Butterflies for the Useful Calendar -- some works in progress

I've been painting watercolor illustrations of butterflies for the 2019 Useful Calendar, and sharing pictures of some of them on my Facebook page. But as I always have something  to say about my artworks in progress (the back story, you could say), it occurred to me that this blog is better suited for that.

At the coffee shop, on a day suitable for bike riding, to proofread the calendar in progress.

Even though I settled on butterflies for my calendar illustrations several months ago, I'm a terrible procrastinator, so I started actually doing them about a month ago. Each one takes four to six hours to complete, so I really can't do more than one in a day; and I prefer to allow two or three days for the whole process: two days for sketches and studies and painting, then one day to set it aside before taking a fresh look and adding any finishing touches.

I've managed to condense the process into one day by making it my primary occupation (it's very difficult for me to make anything my primary occupation), and by being rather more disciplined about it than is my nature. It being cold and snowy and getting dark early does help, because I don't feel much temptation to get out on my bike in the afternoon these days.

A slightly later version of the calendar, with a few of the butterflies in place.

But a thaw is coming, and I have bulbs and roots (of butterfly-friendly native plants) still to plant, so I will have to muster a bit of extra resolve to finish the last two (yes, two left!) and get the calendar done and ready to go by the end of this weekend (which I am determined to do). Then I will make it available in my Etsy shop and, hopefully, at a couple of local consignment shops.

Now, here are the first few illustrations, with a bit of context and an explanation for why that butterfly for this month. I'll share more of them over the next week or so. 

Monarchs wintering on eucalyptus 

I wanted each month's butterfly to relate somehow to its month, so, being a Minnesotan, I wondered what I should do with the winter months. That led me to think about monarchs migrating. It's widely known that our monarchs fly to Mexico for the winter, but I learned a couple of years ago that those west of the Rockies winter in coastal California, in eucalyptus groves. So my January butterflies are monarchs on eucalyptus. 

I like to think these are in Pacific Grove, a charming city adjacent to Monterey. We stayed in Pacific Grove when our son graduated from the Defense Language Institute a couple of years ago, at a motel called the Butterfly Grove Inn, so named because it is next to a butterfly sanctuary. It was June, so there were no monarchs at the time, but it was a new discovery for me that monarchs wintered there. We hope to go back some winter.

Pacific Grove has a very nice natural history museum, too. I highly recommend it.

A pig and tiger swallowtails enjoying some mud

The Year of the Pig begins February 5, 2019, and I have made it a tradition to feature the lunar new year animal in my calendars, so I contemplated how to combine the two. What do they have in common? Well, as it happens: an affinity for mud! Several species of butterflies, including the tiger swallowtails depicted here, will gather in mud puddles to extract vital minerals from the wet soil, a practice known as puddling.

Question mark butterfly, left (November); zebra longwing, right (December)

I've not been painting them in any particular order, and since I am showing you winter butterflies (well, the swallowtails aren't a winter butterfly, I just put them in February because they "go" with the pig), here are some more of those.

The December butterfly is a zebra longwing (right), which flies year round in the far south including Florida, southern Texas, Mexico and Central America. It is the state butterfly of Florida, and one of its nectar plants is the firebush, on which I placed it to add a little splash of color.  

The question mark, shown perched head down on a spruce branch, could still be active in November in a milder region than Minnesota. Some of them will migrate to southern states, and some will hibernate in the north. Hibernating butterflies tuck themselves into a crevice in a tree or structure, or crawl into the midst of a brush pile, and spend the winter in a dormant state.  This nature museum in Chicago offers a nice succinct explanation of butterfly hibernation.

Butterflies may hibernate at any stage in their life cycle, depending on species. Those that hibernate as adults emerge fairly early in the spring, likely before there are any flowers to provide nectar. Luckily, flower nectar is not their preferred food; rather, they feed on tree sap, rotting fruit, and animal waste. 

That includes the mourning cloak, my March butterfly and another one that hibernates in adult form. I have seen these flying when there is still some snow on the ground — they'll even land on a snow pile to sip a little moisture, and probably get some nutrients from the dirt that's mixed in.

Hibernating butterflies, in whatever life stage they do it, need shelter in the form of leaf litter, brush piles and wood piles, as well as mature trees with gaps and crevices they can crawl into. You can help them out by not tidying up your yard too much in the fall.

Art, inspiration, pigs, and butterflies

I've been pondering and playing around with design ideas and a theme for the next edition of the Useful Calendar, which I start working on shortly after the current year begins. It comes in two formats: a set of cards for desk or purse, and a year-at-a-glance poster. I focus on the cards first, making the poster only after all refinements and corrections are completed on the cards to save duplicated effort.

Most years I take the Lunar New Year animal as my theme, and for 2018, which is Year of the Dog, I even modified the layout to allow more room for illustrations—because dogs, right?

For most years prior to this I did one illustration for the cover card and put more text on the individual months, as in 2017, the Year of the Rooster:

But in 2016, feeling uninspired by the Year of the Monkey, I decided to change the theme to bees. Specifically, 12 wild (native) bees from around the world. But I didn't have any ideas about how to make more room for the illustrations, so the cards were still quite text heavy and the bees were kind of small—the original watercolors are about 4 x 6 inches; the calendar cards are 2.75" by 4.25".

I did take the bee illustrations and the research I did about them and make it into a zine, which is available in my Etsy shop, and locally at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

Which brings us to 2019—Year of the Pig. I wanted to continue with the new layout allowing more room for art, which means coming up with 12 unique illustrations of pigs. I  had started to gather some ideas, trivia, and inspiration about pigs to inform the artwork, including looking for folktales about pigs and bookmarking sites with curious pig trivia, like this one about Pigcasso, a painting pig in South Africa, and another about a spot in the Bahamas called Pig Beach.

But, as fun as those discoveries might be, none of it was inspiring me to start doing illustrations of pigs. I mean, even with the added room for artwork, it's still got to be quite small, and a picture of a swimming or painting pig kind of needs some context, and I still needed to come up with 10 more unique ways to depict pigs. It just wasn't working for me.

So I asked myself, what would I like to illustrate the 2019 calendar with? 

When I am pondering ideas I tend to stare out the window. And when I look out the window I see a foot of snow in the middle of April. So, naturally, I think about my garden, and summer ... and butterflies.

Question mark butterfly, perched on the wood frame of my kitchen garden last summer.

And it just so happens that I've already got a lot of butterfly photos that I've taken in my own garden.

A slightly tattered tiger swallowtail visiting hydrangea in an alley near Minnehaha Falls park

 I'll also do illustrations by referencing a variety of photos on the web to put together a generic composite image, such as for this watercolor of a nonspecific azure butterfly:

So now that I've settled on a theme, the next step is choosing colors (one of them will certainly be butterfly blue) and fonts. See my next post about my design inspirations and ideas here.

Some of my illustrations end up on note cards, book plates, and stickers, which you can see in my Etsy shop, also called Sharon's Compendium.

The 2018 Useful Calendar Goes to the Dogs

The Year of the Dog is coming up in 2018, so how could I not want to make that the theme of the Useful Calendar, my annual project of research and art?

I'm embarrassingly late with the calendar this year and there's no excuse for it. I even got an early start, working out my color scheme back in February and setting up the framework for a new design for the cards, so as to make more room for artwork and generally make it more visually appealing. 

This just in: calendars are done and available in my Etsy shop (just click this sentence). Yay!

Less text, bigger art

The backs of the calendar cards are still filled with text and some obscure but interesting holidays, but in a bit more reader-friendly design

More room for art means that instead of doing one illustration of a dog for the cover card, I needed 12 dogs. So I made a plan for getting it done in a timely manner, including doing all the illustrations by mid summer.

I'm still working on those illustrations.

Collecting photos that I can use as references for my watercolors is one part of the challenge. This summer I took some furtive photos of dogs with people, but only one turned out to be usable, as it happened. 

A dog with its person at the Riverview Cafe. I'm pretty sure the dog's look meant it was giving me permission to use the photo as a reference for this illustration.

Café dog as August dog

Mostly, I have looked online for photos I could use as references without violating anyone's copyright. For me, that means not considering art photography, and not copying anything as closely as I did my own photo. The photos I looked for were to give me the general idea of the scene I'm trying to create, with wide creative interpretation, as with this snowstorm photo from a Chicago newspaper article. 

As you can see, it was rather drab and dark anyway, but very helpful in getting the sense of walking a dog during a March blizzard. 

I changed the person's garments, modified their posture somewhat, added the scarf both for color and to convey the sense of the wind, and changed the breed of the dog to sort of a golden retriever, with a wind-blown tail.

This rainy scene was also from a newspaper photo, with fewer modifications, especially to the dog. But still dressing the person up a bit more colorfully and modifying their posture a bit, especially to hide their face under the umbrella. 

I'm still plugging away at the illustrations at this late date in November, but I'm kind of getting on a roll, you might say. It's like I'm getting more familiar with basic dog anatomy and that makes the process a bit quicker. I no longer create a grid over the photo to get the proportions correct, I just do a few quick sketches, decide on the things I want to change, and then get out the paints.

Once the artwork is done and placed, I'll just need to tinker with the design to make a version with the weeks starting on Sunday so customers can choose their preference. I'll proofread it again, too, even though I've done so several times already. I may even catch all the mistakes by the time the artwork is done.

Fortunately, we don't have a lot going on over Thanksgiving, so I hope to have it completed by the end of the holiday weekend.

And the featured cover dog was easy — I used an illustration I actually did complete this summer, for my little zine about listening to the night sounds in my bucolic city neighborhood, which I wrote about here.

And that drawing is also going to be my December dog, since it looks to me like it's singing a Christmas carol. So I used it to make a Christmas card as well.

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Calendars for people who want more than pretty pictures

I think calendars make excellent gifts because they are both useful and beautiful, and they come in such a variety of themes and formats that you can almost certainly find one that speaks to a person's interests, thus fitting the gift to the person in a very particular way.

For myself, I want a calendar to be much more than pretty or cleverly designed (although I do admire good design for its own sake) — I want it to be highly informative, to feed my curiosity, to cater to my interest in the natural world and in other countries and cultures.

These considerations inform my own calendar making (about which I'll say more at the end), and inspire me to buy myself at least one calendar each year, even though I make and sell my own. Having found these especially interesting and informative calendars, I may end up buying more than one this time!

Here are a few calendars that would make excellent gifts for curious people.

The Minnesota Weatherguide calendar has always been one of my favorites for its phenology and weather facts, as well as wonderful nature photographs from all around my state. It includes information about the changing seasons, the angle of the sunlight, the observable stars and planets, and the Ojibwe names for the moon.

2017 Weatherguide wall calendar

My favorite version is the engagement calendar, and for a few years they stopped publishing that format, likely because it was more expensive to produce, having a photo for every week instead of just every month. Now they've brought the engagement calendar back and I've been very pleased to buy it again. Phenology notes are included for every week, along with a seasonal photograph, and I try to keep my own gardening and phenology notes on the facing pages, though I often neglect it for weeks on end.

I used to record a lot of our activities in these when we were homeschooling our two kids — more accurately "unschooling," in a mostly loose jumble of explorations and activities. When I had to make transcripts for each of them (one to enter college, the other for the military), those calendar notes really came in handy, along with some other records I had saved. (I strongly recommend that homeschooling families save their calendars!)

Some Weatherguide engagement calendars I have used.

The Old Farmer's Almanac, which is marking 225 years in 2017, has a very informative online calendar — you can click on any date and be taken to a page with interesting "on this day in" trivia. Most of it is not what I would call "useful" information, but interesting and kind of fun, nonetheless.

They also have several printed calendars that focus on a subject area, like this gardening one, which has stylish kind-of-retro graphic illustrations, along with gardening tips.

Their Everyday Calendar is a page-a-day with "facts, folklore, proverbs and puzzles."

Sample page from the Everyday Calendar by the Old Farmer's Almanac

Amber Lotus publishing has a lot of beautiful calendars, in both wall and engagement formats, which include US and Canadian legal holidays, observances of the major world religious, and phases of the moon. Each has some additional focus, such as quotes from Thich Nhat Hahn, or quotes about nature from a variety of people. Many of these are a little too corny-profound for my taste, but will appeal to others. Here's one I like, which is free of quotes; it just features delightful bird illustrations by Geninne D Ziatkis.

(If you like Geninne's art, you might also like her Etsy shop.)

Chris Hardman's Eco-logical 2017 Engagement Calendar from Pomegranate claims to offer "a new way to experience time" with information about planets, seasons, animal behavior, and "a host of information about the natural world," with a focus on the northern hemisphere. It also has world holidays and a time-zone map. It looks to be a more wide-ranging complement to the Minnesota-specific Weatherguide Calendar.

I call my own calendar the Useful Calendar because it provides a lot of information in a small amount of space.  It lists holidays from many countries and all the major religions, plus a few other international observances of an earth-friendly or literary nature.

My aim is to facilitate inclusiveness and to accommodate both curious and considerate people. A person in the US might not need to know all the major holidays in Japan, for example, but they might still find it interesting to know them. (In 2015, I wrote about why I started making the Useful Calendar, which you can read here if you'd like to know.)

I consult several different online calendars and other references when I'm researching it each year, not only to find the dates of moveable holidays, but also to continuously update and revise my content. And I provide brief explanatory notes about changes and other tidbits on how I compile and present my calendar. Then I design it in a couple of different formats to accommodate different needs. Both formats are available in two versions, one with weeks starting on Sunday, and the other with a Monday start and the weeks numbered (based on ISO 8601 week date standard).

One version fits on a single 11x17 sheet to display a full year at once, with limited notes at the bottom but no room for additional information about the holidays.

Find this format of the 2017 Useful Calendar by clicking here.

The other format is a set of cards, which have brief descriptions of most of the holidays on the back of each month. I don't have the space to write something about all the holidays, so I try to vary somewhat from year to year which ones I highlight, or what and how much I say about them.

Here's the set of 2017 calendar cards, with Monday start and week numbers, and a wooden card holder, offered as a desk calendar.

Here's the other version of the calendar card set, with Sunday week start.

And here's a look at the backs of the calendar cards, crammed with information.

The calendar cards are also available with a sleeve so they may be carried in a purse or pocket. This is one of a few patterns for the sleeves, which are "laminated" with packing tape to make them more durable. I make each one by hand.

I have often had the intention to make something of an almanac zine as well, to allow for even more text about every holiday and maybe some additional facts, but as a one-person operation working on a time-sensitive project, I have tended to run out of time. I actually have a 2017 almanac zine in progress, but if it isn't done by early January, I'll likely abandon the project for this year. Or complete it for my own use and as a prototype to adapt for 2018.

Thanks for reading. I hope I helped you find a really swell calendar for someone on your gift list!

The Useful Calendar Part 2: Dragons and Robbers

I wrote about the origins of the Useful Calendar, and why I call it that, in this post yesterday. Today I'll finish the story.

The Useful Calendar Goes International

Once I started selling the calendar on Etsy, I shifted from a hyper-local focus and made it into an international calendar. It now includes all US federal holidays and many international observances, as well as important holidays of the world’s major religions. 

Each year it seems that I discover some holiday or observance I haven't included before that I feel I should add, either because it's from a country that I see as on an equal footing with others I've chosen to include (if the Belgian National Day, why not the Swiss?), or because I find it to be a delightful occasion and think others will too (such as the Japanese Doll Festival). Depending on when these occur, I may drop something else to fit it in (July and August almost always have room; February and March are always crowded). 

2012: The Year of the Dragon and a Bigger Calendar

A few years ago, my husband suggested that I make the one-page poster version larger, so I made it tabloid-size (11 x 17 inches) in 2012. 

It was the year of the dragon, and with our own bankruptcy and foreclosure still fresh in my mind—stemming from the failure of the Observer in 2006— and knowing that so many others had been through a similar experience what with the recent real estate bust, I drew my dragon as a (mortgage) banker in a blue suit. It was sort of my own little inside joke.

The 2012 calendar—the year of the dragon—at twice the size of the 2011 edition

And since I had a little extra space in January, I added a quote from Patricia Wrede's book, Talking to Dragons: "Always be polite to dragons."

Design Innovations Spurred by a Robbery

My approach to designing these has been pretty much haphazard and jury-rigged, using Adobe's Illustrator program when InDesign is better suited to the task. But in 2012, when I was nearly finished with the 2013 edition, I got an opportunity to start fresh with an InDesign template created by my friend, Marsha Micek, a professional graphic designer. 

The impetus for this improvement was the theft of my computer (and my husband's) along with our backup drive in October 2012. I had to start all over again, including re-entering all of the data and text, at a point when I should have been printing it out for a craft show that weekend. I cancelled my part in the show and spent the next couple of weeks scrambling to reconstruct the calendar with Marsha's excellent (and patient) guidance, in order to get it ready for another craft show in early November.

The 2013 not-quite-so-useful calendar, with July starting a day late and ending a dollar short!

The new template worked great, but in my haste, and being more than a little flustered, I completely messed up the month of July, starting it a day late and giving it only 30 days (the second mistake kept me from screwing up the months that followed, however). My husband discovered the error a few months into the year. He thought it was amusing, but I was mortified. How can I call it the "useful" calendar when a mistake like that?

In this year, I stopped circling and naming the full moons and instead did some drawings of the moon phases to use across the bottom of each month. I did this to add another graphic element to the design, as well as to provide a little more moon phase information for those who were looking for that sort of thing.  







I obsessively checked and double-checked the 2014 edition, and discovered no embarrassing errors in that one, though I do recall some minor errors I found and fixed after I thought it was done.

After my daughter graduated from college and completed a 6-month internship at Experience Life magazine, I realized that I had access to a skilled proofreader, and asked her to read the 2015 edition. She was very thorough and caught some spelling irregularities and inconsistencies that had existed for a few years, plus my placing of Cinco de Mayo in March. I like to think I would have caught that one myself before printing it. 

I had been doing a few sketches of sheep for this year's calendar when I learned that some people called it the year of the goat. That led me to do a little more research, and some goat drawings, and to then work this dichotomy into the calendar design, along with a brief explanation about it, because, you know—Arty Didact. 

I wrote about the goat/sheep year confusion here earlier this year.

Calendrical Curiosities and Serendipities

Among the things I enjoy about creating this calendar each year are the serendipitous discoveries I make during the research phase, such as the Japanese Doll Festival that I mentioned above. So many of these holidays have interesting stories behind them that I wish I had room to say something more about them without sacrificing the functionality of the calendar.

A few years ago, I started putting notes on the backs of the cards to offer a little bit of explanation, especially for those holidays that I thought most of my audience would be unfamiliar with. Then I realized that the stories behind even familiar holidays are often forgotten, so I mixed it up a bit, changing some of the occasions for which I offer explanatory notes from one year to the next, and introducing some calendrical trivia where I had room (August, mostly). 

The 2015 calendar cards, showing the notes on the backs of March and September

This has become my way of sharing the serendipitous pleasure of learning something new and interesting as you make your way through the year.

Of course, these little trading-card size calendar pages don't allow for much in the way of telling the stories behind holidays, and so I have often thought about introducing a third version of the calendar that would be a sort of zine, or an almanac, with short informative articles about calendar-related topics. And while I'm at it, why not provide space for people's own notes, like a planner? I played around with a prototype of this last year, but didn't have time to develop it further.

And so now, while my updated list of dates and events for the 2016 Useful Calendar is in the hands of my capable fact-checker, I am in the process of developing the new Useful Calendar-planner-almanac. And playing around with what to call it. Because Useful Almanac sounds even sillier than Useful Calendar. On the other hand, there's branding. 

So my current working prototype (really a couple of prototypes, this journal made with scratch paper being one) has multiple names. Or maybe one name followed by an explanatory subtitle.

Stay tuned.