Category Archives: calendar

Images of 2025.

calendar, history, time, ,

Here is a smattering of pictures, one from each month of 2025. It was hard to choose just one per month. I can think of possible thematic collections from the year that might be done, so that I could re-post more — but I probably should keep looking to today instead, and the many household projects I want to do that don’t involve sitting at the computer. Still, it was fun to briefly scroll through the months and assemble these:

January – pomegranates in the back garden
February – Eucalyptus along the creek path
March – Memorial for my husband, 10 years
April – Gathering nettles in the North
May – Paros, Greece
June – Thessaloniki, Greece
July – In the High Sierra
August – Boba tea
September – My tallest sunflower ever
October – Maggie’s wedding in Wisconsin
November – Seedy crackers
December – Christmas with Lori

And there it went! I had already forgotten some of the blessings that came to me, as each day and week and month raced past. I wonder what images will be worth saving in 2026?

So much of any year is flammable.

calendar, poetry, time, ,

I hadn’t read this poem carefully since 2011 when I first posted it. Now that I consider it afresh, that last line about Things I Didn’t Do is haunting me again!

BURNING THE OLD YEAR

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye, born 1952, American poet

When when Maria Horvath posted this poem on her blog in 2011, she included the painting below, “Abstracto,” 1935 by Joan Miró

Theophanies into which we may enter.

calendar, church, quotes, time

As we close in on the end of the calendar year, our rector posted thoughts about the liturgical calendar in our parish bulletin. We Orthodox know at some level that the calendar of festal events and saints’ days “sanctifies time” — but do we live it fully? It’s not an easy thing to prioritize the “holy appointments,” as Fr. Stephen Freeman recently characterized them, in our lives that are typically super busy with various other activities. An excerpt:

This feast, this day, this time in my life, if I will keep the appointment, I can meet God. The feasts on the calendar are not appointments with memorials, the recollection of events long past. They are invitations to present tense moments in the liturgical life of the world. In those moments there is an intersection of the present and the eternal. They are theophanies into which we may enter. The events in Christ’s ministry that are celebrated (to use one example) are of little importance if viewed in a merely historical manner. It is not enough to say and remember that Christ died. The Christian faith is that I must become a partaker of Christ’s death. Christ is Baptized, but I must be a partaker of His Baptism. This is true of all the feasts and is the reason for our liturgical celebrations. The Church is not a memorial society—it is the living presence of Christ in the world and the primary means by which we may share in His presence. There is no time like the present, for only in the present does time open its riches to us and bestow its gifts.

Stories behind December 25th.

calendar, Christmas, history, quotes

Most people, even Christians, don’t care whether the date of December 25th derives from a pagan solstice festival, but historians are interested in many aspects of this story; one of these aspects is the way in which earthly powers try to control or use popular religion to further their aims. Williaim J. Tighe is a historian and a Christian whose article “Calculating Christmas” explains how this impulse led one emperor to establish a completely new pagan festival. The last time I posted this “public service announcement” concerning the date of Christmas, I highlighted the historical evidence that Tighe cites for the early church having chosen their date before that pagan festival was ever established.

But there is the other question we might have: How did the Christians choose their date? It seems that Christ’s mother was not of a mind to be keeping a journal, but rather, Luke tells us, “Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.” The author tells us in detail how the dating of Christmas is tied to the effort to figure out when it was that Christ died. It’s not easy to calculate that, either, it turns out:

“There is a seeming contradiction between the date of the Lord’s death as given in the synoptic Gospels and in John’s Gospel. The synoptics would appear to place it on Passover Day (after the Lord had celebrated the Passover Meal on the preceding evening), and John on the Eve of Passover, just when the Passover lambs were being slaughtered in the Jerusalem Temple for the feast that was to ensue after sunset on that day.

“Solving this problem involves answering the question of whether the Lord’s Last Supper was a Passover Meal, or a meal celebrated a day earlier, which we cannot enter into here. Suffice it to say that the early Church followed John rather than the synoptics, and thus believed that Christ’s death would have taken place on 14 Nisan, according to the Jewish lunar calendar. (Modern scholars agree, by the way, that the death of Christ could have taken place only in A.D. 30 or 33, as those two are the only years of that time when the eve of Passover could have fallen on a Friday, the possibilities being either 7 April 30 or 3 April 33.)

“However, as the early Church was forcibly separated from Judaism, it entered into a world with different calendars, and had to devise its own time to celebrate the Lord’s Passion, not least so as to be independent of the rabbinic calculations of the date of Passover.” 

“…there is evidence from both the Greek East and the Latin West that Christians attempted to figure out the date of Christ’s birth long before they began to celebrate it liturgically, even in the second and third centuries. The evidence indicates, in fact, that the attribution of the date of December 25th was a by-product of attempts to determine when to celebrate his death and resurrection.”

I’ll leave you to decide if you want to get the rest of the story by reading the article itself. Last time I shared it, more than one of my readers said the date was not important to them, and one said this information was important. Many years ago I was briefly influenced against enjoying certain Christian festivals because of things written against them by the  uninformed, so I very much appreciate those true historians who love to dig deep. Tighe points us to a longer work on the subject for those who want more details (I haven’t gone further myself). Here’s his own fairly brief summary: “Calculating Christmas.”