Do you like to save money? Recycling your old calendars is fun!

Everybody has that favorite calendar. It may be a favorite artist or scenes from a place you visited. It may represent a cause. (I receive ones from the Humane Society, Cat Adoption Team, and Best Friends Animal Sanctuary annually.) It may be a calendar you made yourself, or one that was made for you by friends, children, or grandchildren. It may be something funny that always makes you laugh, no matter how bad your day has been. Or maybe it’s really old and nostalgic, and you just can’t throw it away.

I have a drawer filled with old calendars. Imagine my delight when I found a way I could use them again and again!

It’s called the Perpetual Calendar, a calendar that is valid for many different years. Perpetual calendars use algorithms to compute the day of the week for any given year, month, and day of month. With a Perpetual Calendar, you can figure out which years are the same as this one, so you can use those old calendars again.

Here’s how it works. Say, you want to find out which calendars in your drawer you can use this new year, 2021. According to the chart at the Accuracy Project, you have quite a choice. Here are the years that had or will have identical dates to 2021:

1802, 1813, 1819, 1830, 1841, 1847, 1858, 1869, 1875, 1886, 1897, 1909, 1915, 1926, 1937, 1943, 1954, 1965, 1971, 1982, 1993, 1999, 2021, 2027, 2038, 2049, 2055, 2066, 2077, 2083, 2094, 2100.

Now you know what to do with that 1802 calendar your ancestors brought across the prairies in their covered wagons.

Don’t limit yourself to wall calendars! Here’s a beautiful linen tea towel for our sister year of 1971.

So dig out that old Space 1999 calendar – this year you can use it again!

Happy New Year!