It’s the 2026 Useful Calendar, Now With Even More Usefulness
The calendar zine in progress, showing the title page but not the cover.
The new Useful Calendar featuring 12 horse illustrations for the upcoming Year of the Horse is ready (mostly), and will be available (in at least some iteration) at the LoLa Art Crawl, Sep. 20–21.
Those parenthetical qualifiers are about two things: My usually reliable local printshop, which is printing the desk/pocket version (a set of cards) and the 11x17 poster, had a printer breakdown and is awaiting the arrival of their service technicians; and the planner-diary version, which I make myself as a handbound book, will be ready in mid-October. Fortunately, I also make a small calendar zine myself, here at home, which is relatively quick and easy to print and assemble, so I can at least be certain of that one. It’s a little booklet, with a pocket and a few plain gridded pages for your notes. Hence the claim of even more usefulness.
A few of my zines and a test print of the calendar
In fact, I am in the process of assembling several zines this week for LoLa and, after LoLa, the shop at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, which will carry the Useful Calendar when I bring it to them. The zines (and soon the calendars) are also available in my online shop, here.
Having the calendar “done”—that is, ready for printng—is a big deal to me because creating it is a much more involved and research-heavy process than you might expect for a mere calendar. That’s because it’s not really just a calendar; it’s kind of an almanac, loaded with holidays and observances from many religions and countries, plus a little background information about many of them, and about the featured animal.
I also add and subtract days and observances each year, based on current events, and whatever I learn about the featured animal. All that research and fact-finding, plus 12 unique illustrations—with explanatory captions—are why I refer to the calendar as my annual “project.” And it’s also what keeps me interested in creating it year after year. I’m always learning something new.
Some of my notes for compiling and updating the Useful Calendar
For example, I added several Ukrainian holidays a couple of years ago after Russia invaded that sovereign country, then had to revise the dates as Ukraine rejected the Russian Orthodox church and the Julian calendar and embraced the Euro-focused Gregorian calendar instead.
In the 2026 edition, Greenland’s National Day (June 21) is newly noted, plus a couple of Panamanian national commemorations, which I looked up when our president was lusting after those countries. While his attention appears to have wandered, I still find those countries, and what they choose to commemorate, interesting.
Pony Express rider, for April in the 2026 Useful Calendar
The 2025 calendar (Year of the Snake) has a couple of snake holidays, which I dropped for the 2026 (Year of the Horse) edition; but the 2026 calendar has the Kentucky Derby and Royal Ascot, the annual “pony swim” on Chincoteague Island, Virginia, a note and illustration about the brief run of the Pony Express, and the feast day of Saint Eligius, patron of horses, among other things, probably none of which will appear in the 2027 calendar.
If you’d like to know more about the story behind the Useful Calendar, including why I call it that, have a look at what I wrote in my old blog about it, here.