On Calendars

A beginning of the year thought exercise

I.

One of my favorite ways to be quietly nosy about the inner workings of someone else’s life is to look at how they keep and organize time.

My friend Kelsey still believes in the efficacy of wall calendars. Our end-of-year routine often involves me asking which themes she picked out for the year (she likes to have multiple ones in the house).

My partner, Robert, just keeps everything in his head without writing things down (occasionally resulting in embarrassing double-booking when people from two separate friendship circles show up to our house at the same time). His method mystifies me most of all. Sometimes, it is the people who are closest to you who wind up feeling like complete unknowns.

My own preferred method for retaining some temporal control over my life is a bullet journal, varying in artistic design and detail depending on the time I have in December of the preceding year for set-up and the quality of the journal paper available to me. Still I am nosy, looking for the way others set up their bullet journals, from YouTubers to friends of mine.

This might be sharing more about myself than I am willing to admit, but one of my favorite parts of the year is the month of December, when I put together my bullet journal spread for the rest of the year. I normally don’t like the overeager anticipation of the year ahead, with end-of-year recaps starting in November, but this I allow myself because I want to start the new year feeling already prepared, not catching up on my organization.

II.

I’ve been thinking a lot about calendars as a form of cultural organization, which leads into calendars as a form of cultural hegemony. Calendars express cultural values, and change—as the cultural makeup of New York City changes, so does the school calendar, with new holidays marked as days off. Not necessarily out of the great cultural sensitivity of the powers that be (although there is some of that, greatest city in the world baby!) but for practical reasons—there’s no sense in holding school on days where 10-20% of the citywide student body is going to be absent.

Serbia is the first place I’ve lived in where the dominant calendar does not match the holidays I celebrate, which sometimes generates a feeling of internal displacement that I suppose I am lucky to feel for the first time in my mid-20s rather than as an immigrant child. Things feel off.

However, the fact that this is the first time I am feeling this way reflects the hegemony of the Western Christian calendar over the globe. Even people who do not celebrate Christmas on the 25th know what date Catholics and Protestants celebrate Christmas.

For many people in the non-Western world, awareness of the Western calendar is a must because of their jobs. Freelancers in other countries who work primarily in the Western market have to time their days off to adjust to American and European work schedules that their clients keep, rather than their own preferences. This is not just a white collar matter. Most factories worldwide are now so enmeshed in the global supply chain that work depends directly on working time in the West where their markets and headquarters are located. Factory workers in Serbia have gone on strike in the past because management did not give them days off for Easter, one of the most important holidays in the Orthodox calendar, but attempted to impose work schedules drawn up by HQ instead.

The dominance of the Western calendar manifests itself in the movements of the Internet. I’ve written before how the content schedule especially for food publications is by necessity of readership pegged to the U.S. calendar. Even non-US-based food bloggers wind up making some concession to Thanksgiving, and those of us outside of the US have to read about it. The seasons on the Internet are the seasons in the Northern Hemisphere, specifically, the continental United States. Attention is a numbers game, and a power game as well.

III.

I do love my new dual calendar life, as much as it serves to remind me of my own alienness.

I feel as if I get a do-over, a second chance. If I didn’t feel enough of the Christmas spirit for my date, I get a second chance with Robert’s (once the madness of December is over). If I get off to a slow start for the new year, there’s the Julian calendar New Year two weeks later.

In The European Review, Oksana Forostyna wrote about Ukraine’s calendar, “Considering myself witty, I used to say that Ukraine fell behind Europe not by decades, but by thirteen days.” It’s not as if the religious calendars dictate public life anyway, not even holiday celebrations—thank the atheist communists for that!

Some may see this as a falling behind, but I prefer this easing into the year. It’s easier to resist the pressure to self-optimize in January, pressure that tends to work on me like a rat on a hamster wheel, and give yourself several fresh starts when you know come January 1st that you have two more major holidays coming up before the end of the month.

So, an essay in honor of calendars, however they are organized, shared, and infiltrate our lives. My own content calendar is more elaborate this year, and I hope to actually fulfill it. A calendar without events or without obligations met is just a row of boxes.