Calendar days

COMMENTARY

There’s also the obligatory illustration of the four moon phases, which some calendars put out as twinkling or smiling moons, precluding any urge to do graffiti on the moon faces.

It's the time of the year again when grabbing hold of next year's large-sized, a nicely-printed calendar is an obsessive pursuit.

While a large visible calendar hanging or plastered on a wall is undoubtedly an ephemeral object in our daily lives that has no posthumous life after its use, there's more to it.

Nowadays, of course, any passable smartphone liberates us from the mundane task of hanging a printed calendar.

Yet, something is incoherently inconvenient about confirming a day's date on a calendar app when a mere glance at a printed Gregorian lunar-solar calendar usually suffices.

Anyway, a calendar is a word, says the Encyclopedia Britannica, "derived from the Latin 'calendarium,' meaning 'interest register' or 'account book,' itself a derivation from 'calendae' (or kalendae), the first days of the month in the Roman republican calendar, the day on which future market days, feasts and other occasions were proclaimed."

And, this brings us to the familiarly large-sized bare-facts calendar (usually measuring nowadays at 8.5 inches by 14 inches) printed on flimsy white paper stock sporting outsized numbers in blue and red and usually seen hanging in Filipino-Chinese business establishments.

Examining this utilitarian "commercial" calendar reveals its design hasn't changed much since its inception more than a hundred years ago.

Still advertising on its upper portion a business name and its merchandise, it still uses blue as the exclusive color for weekdays and red for Sundays.

There's also the obligatory illustration of the four moon phases, which some calendars put out as twinkling or smiling moons, precluding any urge to do graffiti on the moon faces.

Panels listing official legal holidays and dates on when taxes are due are also common features.

Some of the better ones also feature an almanac on tides. Above a particular date, printed in blue, is the time and height of the high tide and below it, in red, the time and height of the low tide.
How there are definite facts on tides I don't conclusively know.

Perhaps vital tide information is a throwback to how things were in old Binondo, Manila's Chinatown. Historically bisected by numerous "esteros" and traversed by "costcos" (small boats), tides perhaps counted in the agile movement of goods in this water-merchandise complex.

At any rate, another secularly-themed calendar that many want is the affectively ostentatious calendar with arresting photographs or reproduced art objects like paintings.

Lavish eye candy for the most part put out by institutions, such handsomely-designed calendars are designed to elicit Haute bourgeois bliss and are printed on heavier and glossy paper stock and often take pride of place in most homes, rich or poor.

Racier than their conservative counterparts, the pin-up calendar displaying the charms of a well-formed starlet is of recent invention; coming into vogue only in the 1980s when Filipinos saw nothing wrong with unveiled bodies acting as magical adornments to humdrum, harsh, and exploited lives.

Classic props of sari-sari stores and roadside eateries, such calendars admittedly cater to voyeurs and the male gaze and are often derisively dismissed as merely that.

But there's darker intent. As the female body is liberalized as a luxurious object it at the same time never compromises the dogma on which it rests — the dogma perpetuating the misogynistic patriarchic system of Philippine society.

Yet, far more influential in Filipino lives than secularized calendars is the religious calendar.

Spiritually uplifting though are the Christ or the Virgin Mother images, it is the feast days of saints which these calendars have that have bedeviled many a Filipino.

Acting as a baby register of names, religious calendars often discomfits any friend or relative who goes by the elegant first name of Amal but whose fully-spelled name is actually Amalberga, in honor of St. Amalberga's feast day on 10 July.