My husband and I have a quirky habit: We save our old calendars and reuse them in years with matching dates. This saves us from having to buy new calendars each year, and from the old ones ending up in the landfill (or, ideally, getting recycled).
At times, special holidays don’t coincide but that’s not usually an issue, as we receive at least a couple of up-to-date calendars from organizations we support, so we can cross-reference. People have asked if we don’t get bored with looking at the same photos or reading the same information again but, most of the time, enough time has passed for us to have forgotten those details and each calendar is experienced as new. The more years pass, the truer this statement! 🙂
Case in point: The 1998 engagement calendar I have displayed on my desk in 2026, Women Who Dare, published by the Library of Congress. When I turned the page to Lillian Smith in late June, I had no memory of ever having heard of this intriguing individual. In case you have trouble reading the small print in the photo above, I have copied the lines:
Lillian Smith [1897-1966] grew up near Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp, studied music at the Peabody Conservatory, worked as a teacher in China, and settled on a northern Georgia Mountain called Old Screamer, for many years operating a girls’ camp with her partner Paula Snelling. Sensitive and creative from an early age, Smith was deeply struck by “the bleak rituals” of race segregation, and her career in letters focused largely on the psychic roots and effects of racism. From the 1940s, she spoke and wrote widely on behalf of the civil rights movement, addressing not only fellow “intellectual liberals” of the South but casting segregation as “the most conspicuous characteristic of our entire white culture.” Reaction to her views ranged from crazy-old-maid press barbs to the torching (twice) by arsonists of her home and manuscripts. Unfazed, she organized multiracial gatherings of fellow artists and thinkers on Old Screamer, helped cultivate new, progressive black and white southern voices in her literary magazine South Today, and produced works such as Killers of the Dream (1949), a still-fascinating analysis of race prejudice.
Wow! This summary further piqued my interest and led me straight to my online search engine, and to more information about this woman’s remarkable life. I also came across a YouTube video titled Lillian Smith: Breaking the Silence. I spent the next 54 minutes learning more about her biography, her thinking and writing, and her courageous stance when it came to speaking out against racism and segregation in America. I highly recommend you also take the time to watch this film and think you won’t regret it.
The video includes an interview with the author that was broadcast on NBC’s Today Show in 1957 (it starts at 34 minutes and 13 seconds), with the following statement by her:
I think we have to a great extent lost our basic freedom to speak out what we think and what we believe, or to teach it. And I think that we have lost an even more important freedom and that is the freedom to do right, to listen to our own private conscience, instead of listening to the conscience of the demagogue, or the conscience of the mob, or the conscience of the hysterical cause.
Do you also get a sense of déjà-vu?
I might as well have published this post under the heading, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose! Like Katharine Lee Bates and like John Quincy Adams, Lillian Smith stood up and spoke out for what she believed in, looking critically at her country and finding it wanting, before asking it to live up to its ideals.
I have nothing but respect and admiration for her and am heartened by individuals like her who try to make this world a better place for everybody—they sustain my faith in humanity.
Lillian left this world on September 28, 1966, 80 years ago. What would she have to say about her country today?
Hello Tanja,
It’s interesting…I hold on to older calendars and re-use them too for the same reason😊 Thank you for introducing this documentary. I have saved it and will certainly watch it soon. I hope you are staying well.
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Thank you for your interest and comment, Takami. I found the documentary so informative and inspiring and am glad that it might be seen by more people.
Apart from not needing to buy new calendars, it’s fun rediscovering the old ones, isn’t it?
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What an inspiring lady. Like Takami, I have noted the YouTube piece, and will be sure to watch it soon. Yes, Lillian would have a lot to say about recent developments in the US…and in the UK too. We desperately need more people like her today.
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Thank you for your comment, Mr. P. I think calendar entries and documentaries like the ones referenced here are so important because they keep reminding us that individuals can make a difference. And that we need to stay vigilant and engaged lest we backslide.
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Sehr interessant Tanja.
Und heute ist ihr Todestag.
Leider scheint der Homo sapiens nicht in der Lage zu sein dazuzulernen.
Ich wünsche dir einen guten Tag und schicke liebe Grüße
Brigitte
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Danke für den Kommentar, liebe Brigitte. Wie Du weißt halte ich es den Namen für eine Fehlbezeichnung und denke, er müßte eher Homo non-sapiens lauten. Obwohl auch das nicht so richtig ist, denn es gab und gibt ja immer wieder Individuen und manchmal sogar Gruppen von Menschen, die sich für das Gute und Wahre einsetzen, so wie ja Frau Lillian Smith auch. Wir sind halt voller Widersprüche.
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Greetings to you,
Thank you for sharing about the life of such an amazing person!
Like you, I do not recall ever hearing about Lillian Smith prior to this blog.
I also admire people who dedicate their lives trying to help make our world a better place as a whole.
By the way, I loved hearing of you neat routine to save and recycle calanders over the years! I thought that was very clever!
Thank you again for introducing me to Lillian Smith!
Blessings to you,
Gavin B.
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Thank you for your interest and comment, Gavin. I was very impressed by what I learned about Lillian Smith and her persistence in following her convictions, despite attacks on her person and property. I will never understand why people can be so hateful.
Warm wishes,
Tanja
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Thanks for sharing the work of this forward thinker and activist. I hadn’t heard of her either!
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Thank you for your interest and comment, Eliza. I think Lillian Smith deserves to be better known by living generations today. I find it so frustrating that we seem to have to reinvent the wheel every so often.
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It’s always good to learn about someone who worked to make the world better. I don’t recall ever hearing about Lilian Smith.
Like you, though less often, I’ve sometimes put an old calendar back to work. Not counting holidays that move around, 14 different calendars exist: 7 for leap years and 7 for non-leap-years.
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Our collective memories seem rather short-lived, considering how many once-influential persons are no longer known by successive generations.
I did not know how many different calendars there were. As a mathematician, you can probably explain to me why there are only 14.
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Because we have only 7 days in a week, each year must begin on one of those 7 days. We would need only 7 distinct calendars were it not for leap years. Each of those 7 calendars can come in 2 versions, without a leap year or with a leap year, so 7 x 2 = 14.
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An inspiring woman who, I imagine, would be sad to know what the US is today.
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I imagine the same!
Thank you for stopping by and commenting.
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There are so many right-wing jerks throughout the world. It’s a never-ending battle against them.
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I’m afraid you are correct. What I don’t understand is how we keep falling for their horrible ideology when we ought to know better.
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Oh, gosh, what would she have to say? Thanks so much for sharing this. I had never heard of her and hope to make time to watch the video you shared. How many years go by until you can reuse a calendar?
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What indeed?
She might shake her head in disbelief or, knowing human nature, might not be surprised at all.
As far as repeating calendars are concerned, I did not know the answer to your question, used to simply look up when any particular calendar might be reusable. But when I reviewed the attached link and tried out a few other years, the calendar of one particular year seems to be reusable in the following pattern: After 11, 11, 6, 11, 11, 6 years, etc.
Repeating Calendar – years equal to 2026
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Thanks for the info!
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It’s slightly more complicated than that. The cycle of 11, 11, 6 would hold if every fourth year were always a leap year, but that’s not quite the case. The year 2000 was a leap year but 1900 was not and 2100 won’t be either. Few people know that a century year is a leap only if the number formed by its first two digits is a multiple of 4. In the case of the year 1900, 19 is not a multiple of 4, so 1900 was not a leap year. In the case of the year 2100, 21 is not a multiple of 4, so 2100 will not be a leap year. For the year 2000, however, 20 is a multiple of 4, so 2000 was a leap year.
If you go back to the “Repeating Calendar – years equal to 2026” that you linked to, and scroll down to the bottom, you’ll see that you can click to “Extend to 1500 – 2499.” In that longer list of years with the same calendar as 2026, you can confirm that after 1891 it took 12 years, till 1903, before the same calendar could be reused. That’s because the century year 1900 intervened, and 1900 broke the “every fourth year is a leap year” pattern by not being a leap year.
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If you’re wondering about the rationale for the existence of leap years, it’s that a year is approximately 365 and a quarter days. Adding an extra day to the calendar every four years takes into account that extra quarter of a day. But that quarter of a day is only an approximation. A more accurate figure for the number of days in a year is 365.242, whose decimal part is less than one-fourth. In other words, adding a day to every fourth year is a little too much of a correction. The rule about century years takes away three leap years every four centuries in an attempt to correct the first correction. Of course even that isn’t exact, and after enough millennia the calendar will slowly diverge from reality and need to be corrected yet again.
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The calendar re-use is an ingenious bit of recycling! A bonus when it leads you to find out more about this amazing lady. I think she would be very sad and frustrated if she could see what’s happening in the world now.
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Hi, Tanja,
Thanks for introducing us to someone important I have never heard of before and for sharing the video.
Lovely idea to use the calendars again!
Liebe Grüße aus Deutschland!
Anna
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