Calendars

“Isn’t it busy for a Tuesday?” “Why are there so many people shopping on a Sunday?” “It’s very quiet for a Monday morning.”. All these comments trip of the tongue frequently. They have one thing in common when spoken by my mum – the day is invariably wrong!

Calendars, diaries, days of the week, times of the day, all these things used to be very important to my mum. Calendars and diaries were always up to date. The beginning of the year saw the ritual transferring of important information from one year to the next – birthday, anniversaries, holidays. She never forgot a birthday. The walls of the lounge at Christmas were covered in Xmas cards – partly because she had a class of 30 primary kids and parents of every child gave her a card and partly because she sent and received lots of cards. Birthdays and Christmases were days to celebrate – even if one year I found an IOU 50p from Santa in my Christmas stocking.

These days of course birthdays, anniversaries, holidays all fly past with minimum awareness and very little sense of occasion. I do my best to get her to sign cards and give her cards that people send to her, but she doesn’t quite get it. Christmas was a bit of a non-starter really although there were certain elements of it that she enjoyed. She liked watching me decorate the Xmas tree; she liked opening the cards even if she couldn’t always remember the names on them; she enjoyed eating her Christmas dinner; and she enjoyed talking to family on Christmas day although she can’t quite get the hang of holding an iphone. (My brother has just bought her a traditional phone handle that I can now plug into the iphone so she knows which end is which. Haven’t tried it yet.)

What she really liked though was the Jacquie Lawson advent calendar. For those of you who are not Jacquie Lawson aficionados, this is an e-card website which I love because of the classic animated dog cards (it also does other subjects). There is a special advent calendar every year. Mum loved it. I don’t think she quite got what it was mind you. But she did enjoy the different, some interactive some not, scenes of Christmas. Every day in the run up to Christmas we could click on the snowy village icon and enter the village. Then we had to find the date icon which flickered on the scene (bit difficult for mum as it was quite small) and then click on that and watch what happened. The scene she loved was trains against a snowy backdrop.  You could build (and rebuild) your own train, and then watch as it snaked its way along the tracks across the winter scene three times getting smaller and smaller the further away it went. Then when you went back to the village scene, you could spot the train you had just built running across the back of the scene. The sitting room scene you could also tailor to your wishes. We had fun designing our own Christmas stockings to hang from the fireplace and decorating (and redecorating) the Christmas tree. What she also loved was the jigsaw of the scene which you could do at 3 levels of difficulty. By the time we actually got to Christmas day, my time for each level was lightning fast.  She couldn’t actually manipulate the pieces, but she could advise on which pieces went where.  So the advent calendar was a definite hit!

My sister-in-law also has recently developed the habit of producing family calendars from photographs and sending them to us all. She started this a few years ago and they are usually based on holiday photographs, although last year’s had some really old pictures of the family included. I think the first one began in January but the later ones never quite start at the beginning of the year. This year’s starts in February. The pictures this year combine their family visit to Sri Lanka in August last year and my brother’s 50^th in the UK which involved the whole family getting together. Great collection of photographs – some good ones of my mum as well. Lots at the Fortress and lots at my house in Unawatuna. Includes my whole family, my caretaker’s family and the dogs. We’ve already been through it together and spotted various people, dogs and places.  It’s arranged weekly so the plan is to have a look at the calendar every week with mum and talk about the people and places and take it from there. It certainly provides a good jumping off point.  

She may not know what day of the week it is, but she can still appreciate photos of family and if they are on a calendar they are visible the whole year round.

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