Nuns Having Fun

Every December I get a calendar as one of my birthday gifts. Last year I found Nuns Having Fun and bought it impulsively, forcing my mother to return a more appropriate religious calendar to Costco. This year when she asked me what kind of calendar I wanted, I asked her to let me pick it out myself. You see, Nuns Having Fun brought me twelve months of wholesome enjoyment. There's very few things you can buy under $15 that keep you entertained over the course of an entire year.

My favorite was February - a black and white image of the saintly ladies gathered around a firehose, circa 1950, with a man gesturing at the end of the hose. The caption read, "And this nozzle is for the fires of Hell." Ha! USA Weekend wasn't joking when they said, "Proves that wearing a habit can't stop you from letting your hair down... Who could resist?!" Not me!

Like the Giving Tree, a well used calendar generously provides you with invaluable by-products as it counts the days until its own demise. For instance, the pictures can be carefully clipped out and saved until you need to give a thick papercut to your husband while he sleeps. All the old scribbles across birthdays, anniversaries and Valentine's Day can serve as indisputable evidence that someone forgot something important and deserves to be punished again so as not to make the same mistake this year. A sturdy, well loved calendar and enough free time can spit out something that atleast 11 people will read about on a blog. Really, the possibilities are endless!

However, the best and last gift that a calendar gives is a record of all the nothings that wove together the last 365 days. The play dates, the meetings, the visits from family and friends, the appointments when you found out everything was okay and the one where you didn't. It's a register of the cakes that you baked, the phonecalls you made, the cards you sent and the ones that you didn't. A used calendar is one of the hardest things for me to throw away - and I'm sentimental about very few of my possesions.

So what would be a fitting method of disposal for something that preserved so many memories? I could throw it on the fire and give it a Viking-esque farewell. I could take into account the horrific economy of the last year, and make an example of my distaste for 2009 by shredding it for chicken coop bedding. I could give it to the kids and let them draw mustaches and eye patches on the good sisters some rainy day. One way or another, it will be forgotten along with all the days that it accounted for. That's probably a good thing. It's nice to be reminded of the past but it's even better to look forward to the unscripted days to come.

But I'll never forget the image of smiling, loafer-clad nuns on tricycles. Never.




(c) 2010, Kelsey Robbins