Don Farmer: A crisis of calendar dimension

I was making travel plans for the Christmas holidays when I called our travel agent to discuss flights and dates.

“So as you know, Christmas is on a Saturday this year,” said I, but she interrupted. “No, it’s on a Monday.”

“But I’m looking at my calendar; it came by mail with a plea for contributions to a veterans organization,” I explained.

“Check your computer.” So I did and it showed Christmas 2006 on a Monday.

I couldn’t believe it. I double-checked to make sure I was looking at a printed calendar for this year, 2006, not ’05, not ’07. Nope. 2006. Have you ever seen a printed, mass-produced calendar that had wrong dates on it?

I hadn’t, so I phoned the charitable organization that sent out the calendars.

“Oh, sir, we know, we know. Lots of people have let us know that December was really August.”

What? If December was really August, then what was August?

“No, August is OK, for August, but wrong for December. December is wrong, therefore,” explained the lady.

“Well I must tell you I’ve never before received a commercially printed calendar that was not correct. You moved Christmas!”

“That’s what they all say, everybody who calls says it’s a first. May we send you a correct one?”

I said that would be fine. Even though I probably have a dozen other 2006 calendars, all of which are correct so far as I can tell, I know the folks who seeded the nation with 55,000 wrong ones were eager to end their embarrassment and not anger contributors.

Still, I wondered who is in charge of calendars in this country. Is there an official calendar department? Is there some master calendar somewhere in Washington or, knowing what we know about the pork-barrel political feats of Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd, perhaps in West Virginia?

After hours of exhaustive research, done mostly by nice ladies at the Library of Congress, I have discovered the following facts about our beloved calendar, one of society’s linchpins, a standard unsullied by reality TV shows or even the number one enemy of freedom today, Bill Maher:

-- We use the Gregorian calendar, designed by a committee set up by Pope Gregory XIII in the 16th century. Before that the Julian (as in Caesar) calendar was big.

-- Because what is now the U.S. once was owned by several other countries, Britain, France and Spain, for example, we adopted Pope Gregory’s calendar at different times. Florida joined in 1582, along with Spain.

-- Apparently there is no national calendar, just as we have no official national language. Federal holidays are set by law and supervised by the Office of Personnel Management. The Commerce Department has something to do with “standardizing dates for information exchanges,” but I cannot find out what that means.

-- The earliest known date that anybody noticed was the founding of the Egyptian calendar in 4236 B.C. Legend has it that the Chinese emperor Huangdi invented the Chinese calendar in 2637 B.C.

I finally got my new, corrected calendar from that charity group. It seems correct, having Christmas on a Monday and all, but I will double check with my travel agent. She knows everything.

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Don Farmer is a former CNN anchor and ABC News correspondent. E-mail: don@donfarmer.com.