This is an heirloom calendar I inherited from my Great Grandmother who inherited it from her Great Grandmother. This calendar has been in my family for generations. I have been piecing together small bits of its history.

The 1800s had bizarre calendars. Then, the calendars had what we now call the ‘floating weeks.’ These weeks moved around freely in a year and were not tethered to specific dates and month. Imagine not knowing what day it is on Jan 17, 1937, or Feb 17, 1965?

In 1902, driven by a desire to simplify the ‘irrational calendar’ Moses B Cotsworth presented a solar calendar for calendar reform. It was a revolutionary idea. His solar calendar had 13 months of 28 days each. Every date was fixed to the same weekday every year. Every week starts with a Sunday and ends with a Saturday. As a result, every 17th was always a Tuesday.

Impressed by the symmetry of this hyper-rational calendar, George Eastman adopted it for use in his Eastman Kodak Company 1928. Since all months contain exactly the same number of business days and weekends, statistical comparisons by months became more accurate.

Businesses and institutions were quick to adopt this. The popularity of the approach grew so quickly that the government of the United States adopted it as their official national calendar. In a few years, countries across the world reformed their timekeepers to align with the ‘fixed calendar.’

This particular piece is a blend of functional and poetic needs. Since this was a perennial calendar, it remained fixed, unlike the other calendars that needed to be changed every year. Slowly, this highly functional object evolved into an embellished artefact.

It stood the test of time for it carried little memories of the past generations. Through layers of embellishments, this embodied representation of time travelled across generations. When broken, it was lovingly restored and passed on.

Other forms of fixed calendars that evolved during this period