Tag Archives: calendar

A Walk on the Moon

In the traditional history (which is more legend than history) of the Inultaru, the ancient nations of their people would use as many as four different calendars to figure out the auspicious days and seasons of the year. In one of those calendars, the Kalyavella* calendar, every month was thirty days long, and in every second year, called Yoremdeyu, December was forty days long, and in every second second year, called Yoremdeyudeyu, December was forty-one days long. The Inultaru abandoned the use of this calendar long ago, and they switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar along with the Catholic countries of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

A cultural vestige of the old Kalyavella calendar persists. The extra ten (or eleven) days in December became a natural interlude called ayda yorrem-koossa, “a walk on the moon”. It was a holiday observed without deities or pieties, without precise traditions or feast days. It was known for its sense of timelessness, an interval where your past and future carried no consequences, where you could make a place to escape your memories, your hopes, your worries, and your desires. Nowadays, it is a largely forgotten holiday, except that in December, a Jackalopian grandmother might wistfully ask, “Wouldn’t it be nice to go for a walk on the moon this year?” and everybody knows what she means.

*Jackalopes attribute the invention of this calendar to Kandranna Kalyavella, a mythical figure who often carries the blame for inadequate technologies brought about by the ignorance of past generations.

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5

An Honest Serpent Devours Time

The Entropic holidays are the days when the Inultaru celebrate specific events during the Procession of Entropy, which proceeds from the middle of October through the last day of December. Today is the holiday known as Twelve-Eleven or the Eve of the Last Twenty or Dwarfstone Day. It commemorates in advance that moment when our sun will finally blow out and shrink down into a small blue jewel that jackalopes call a dwarfstone. Or maybe a dwarfgem? There is some confusion in the translation; I prefer dwarfstone, but I know there are people who will insist on dwarfgem.

(We can all agree that you definitely do not want to call it a swartstone or swartgem. That translation can only be found in Bidot’s Field Guide to Inultarumek Grammars and Vocabularies, a book that you should ignore or burn because Louis Randolph Bidot was a xenophobic misogynistic hoonyuffalp*.)

Dwarfstone Day is one of the holidays that I left out of the Official 2022 Geranium Lake Propeties Calendar, which was my second attempt to include Jackalopian holidays in a GLP calendar. I did not attempt to do that for the 2024 calendars, and I think I will probably never try again. I discovered that my casual knowledge of astronomy, astrology and alchemy is not sufficient for sorting out the complexities of a true Inultarumet calendar, and my knowledge of the history of Jackalopian holidays is woefully incomplete. Plus I was not born with a jackalope’s instinctive affinity for the planet Mars; jackalopes always know where to find Mars in the night sky.

On the back of the artwork for the GLP comic I posted on December 8th, Yost had written a list of dates, arranged in two groups of four:

1 – 4 – 91
7 – 22 – 91
1 – 22 – 92
6 – 16 – 92

11 – 21 – 92
6 – 8 – 93
12 – 8 – 93 *
5 – 4 – 94

By coincidence, I was familiar with the way the dates were arranged, because two years ago I had made my own list:

Spring Equinox – Feb 07 2021
Summer Solstice – Aug 25 2021
Autumn equinox – Feb 24 2022
Winter Solstice – Jul 21 2022

Spring Equinox – Dec 26 2022
Summer Solstice – Jul 12 2023
Autumn equinox – Jan 12 2024
Winter Solstice – Jun 07 2024

These are the Earth dates for the first days of the four seasons on Mars.

With the intention to add a note of irony to today’s post, I lifted the title from Bidot’s dubious translation of this well=known line, Amkeylan tanna ballakveydi annumoorisso dis leydi, from “Sway Towards the Horizon”, a hymn from the Book of Common Procession Prayers. The correct translation is “The white snake bites its own tail fated forever” or “The lindworm bites its own tail destined forever”.

I am including coloring pages for the masks from both parts of “Seasons Beastlings”. Remember to be polite if a wish demon appears after you finish coloring your mask.

*A slang word that is so rude and so ridiculous that it defies translation. If you have conversed with the spalpeens and mudlarks of the To-inen-wa clan, you are probably cognizant of the gist.

6EQUJ5

The Holiday Season

Another Halloween, another Dia de los Muertos, has moved into time passed and has become a memory to be forgotten, or remembered imperfectly. In the United States, we are well-embarked on the long winter’s journey of the holiday season. For jackalopes, of course, every season is the holiday season, and one of their favorite holidays is coming up on November 7. Currently, I do not have anything to add to what I have previously written about Lantern Day and Patchy Kettle, so you can click the link and review that information, if you wish.

I did not include the Jackalopian holidays in the six calendars I made for 2024. It takes a lot of work to do that without error! Some of the holidays require arcane knowledge about phases of the moon, the orbits of Venus, Mars and Jupiter, leap years, leap back years, ancient Roman history, and an open channel of communication with the bunch of people who decide when Beantoss Mandala Time begins and ends.

However, the main reason I did not include the holidays in the calendars is when I do that, it restricts your choice of grid designs to only one, the “Classic Frameless” grid. Which is beautifully plain and elegantly effective, but I thought that some people might enjoy the hilariously funky “Party” (pictured above). I also tried out “Sakura Deco” (not pictured here) on one of the calendars I printed for myself, which I thought produced a pleasing, somewhat wistful, effect.

(There are a few hours left in the half-off sale on my calendars at Zazzle, and if you are quick you will be in time to to make a purchase. If you are not fast enough, do not fret, there will be another opportunity for a discount before the year ends.)

6EQUJ5

Bat Signal

Right now, calendars are discounted 50% at Zazzle. These sales are ephemeral and quickly disappear (but they also return after some time has passed). Here are links to the six (yes, there are now six!) calendars at my Zazzle shop, just in case you would like to take a look:

6. Maskyrinth 2024

5. Masks For All Seasons 2024

4. Twenty-Two Variation 2024

3. Twenty-Three Masks 2024

2. Full Phiz Masks 2024

1. Masquerade 2024

A Door Stands Open Today

The first image in today’s post comes from Jack Loki’s escapade in “The Conundrum of the Butcher’s Broom”, and the second is a mask of Lokeelma-Adev-Aru, the demalion of closed books. The mask was made by Alice Aroumbeyski, and worn by Jack Loki, in the story “Black Figs and Brambles”. You may have noticed that I have gone back to my original spelling of “demalion” instead of “demmalyun”–this is the outcome of a ferocious hairsplitting discussion that has been taking place behind the scenes.*

Both of these Geranium Lake Properties comics are marked with the date of October 5, but I cannot bring myself to believe in Benedict Thorarinsson’s theory that they somehow commemorate the occasion of a Mundus Patet. Which was one of three days in the year (August 24, October 5, and November 8) when ancient Romans unblocked a door to the underworld (by moving a big rock called a lapis manalis). This allowed the living to communicate (lawfully) with ghosts of the dead and/or minor deities of hell, the di inferi.

That’s your bit of archaic Halloween lore for today.

These masks can be found in the Twenty Three Masks and the Twenty Two Variation calendars for 2024, from my tenacious little shop at Zazzle. The shop was created in 2012, and over the span of 11 years, it has made very little money for me, yet I have profited much in the satisfaction of putting it together. It has become my other Cabinet of Curiosities, another place to display artifacts of culture and myth from the GLP universe.

*A discussion which has now been concluded, Mr. Veerduer.

The Gaze (& Calendars!)

“Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour.” So writes Victor Hugo (Les Misérables). But do not forget that the one you devour with your eyes has her own eyes. What can she see, what can she devour? When she is finished with you, what parts of you will remain?

What parts will be gone?

The top image is an unpublished Geranium Lake Properties comic that was created by Yost to be a part of “The Mystery of the Inauspicious Trees” before he re-wrote the larger part of that adventure, maybe as much as eighty per cent. (That’s my theory, which is supported by the Dawe-Saffery twins.) The second image was published in “Inauspicious Trees” as part of the dramatic moment when the demalion Almayail Im-nayi Kuzimjumla emerges from the bark of a yerastyne tree, more commonly known as an umbrella thorn acacia.

This mask of Almayail Im-nayi Kuzimjumla appears on the back cover of my first calendar for 2024. The other mask in today’s post can be found in the Full Phiz Masks 2024 Calendar, adorning the month of May. Did I write that there will be three calendars of masks for 2024? I ended up making five. However, the fourth calendar is almost exactly the same as the third calendar.

Masks for All Seasons is the fifth calendar for 2024, and will be (hopefully) the final calendar. But there will be more mask designs adapted for mugs, t-shirts and possibly a few throw pillows.

Plummeting Into Fall

We had our first rain yesterday, today is the first of October, and autumn is Here Now*. The Halloween month has begun, (Oh my god, I exclaim, in my best Valley Girl voice.)

Are we ready for it?

Maybe. Almost? I think I need a few days, maybe a week, to be ready.

I have been trying to pick out mask designs for the 2024 calendar, but I had to give up that idea. I had to give up on the idea there would be only one calendar. There will be three. And there will be mugs, And t-shirts.

Are you ready for it?

*Be Here Now by Ram Dass is a book I recommend, not for its content, but for its gawky typefaces and page designs and funky paper tripping right out of the 60’s.

Hasty Terraqueous Deviltry

I have run out of time to make the Official Geranium Lake Properties Calendar for 2023, because of two main reasons. For one, I realized early in October that I wanted this next calendar to feature the masks of GLP, to recreate a small portion of what Betty Ballantine intended for the imaginary book, Alice Has A Cat.

I am still finding mask designs by Alice Aroumbeyski in the GLP archives, and I really do not wish to hurry the process of exploration and discovery.

Reason number two is that I have been made aware (my gratitude to Ha Kim Ngoc, Seth Devishale and Michael Veerduer) of several omissions and a few errors in my list of Jackalopian holidays. As I have said before, jackalopes love any excuse to celebrate a holiday, but I never intended to include all of the holidays in the Official Geranium Lake Properties Calendar. My goal is to include the holidays of greatest significance to Inultaru culture, and also the holidays that I imagine are the most whimsical and/or delicious.

Here is another mask for you to print out and color. This sweet thing is one of the Thousand Young of Dubious Parentage; their mother/father might be Pan, Echidna, Astarte, the Lord of the Woods, or the Black Goat of the Lovecraftian cosmology. According to the usual practice, Thousand Young individuals are not given their own names, much less their own personalities, but jackalopes happily ignore the usual practices. This is Meeloon Kalmshronnalk, a salt scrounger, not very powerful, but they will cheerfully work cheap if you engage them.

Dying All the Time

We are on the cusp of the Halloween holidays, so I feel the need to complete my account of this series of four GLP comics Yost made as illustrations of “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe. This is the final panel, with a grim title appropriate for the denouement of the story. The title is a line from the song “Ruby Tuesday” by the Rolling Stones, a song less gory than the Poe story, yet it still contains a certain measure of the melancholy of human transience. The art for today’s comic was eventually used for a book cover by Red Tower Books.

When Cecil W. Letson was an editor with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, he commissioned Yost’s work for six book covers, including the cover of a 1986 edition of The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays by Virginia Woolf. Unfortunately, none of those six books were published. After the Wolfe project fell apart, Letson left HBJ to work a brief stint as an executive editor for Oxford University Press. It was a time he later described as “three months of crazy” in an interview with Publishers Weekly (he actually stayed at Oxford for eleven months).

While still working for Oxford University Press, Letson started the Red Tower Books and Coffee Club, a subscription service that specialized in tomes of fantasy and horror accompanied by bags of whole bean coffee suitable for making espresso. When Letson moved to David R. Godine as editorial director, Red Tower began publishing its own line of books: tales of terror and strange adventures, ghost stories, and other accounts of marvelous occurrences.

It is an oft-repeated story that Letson, for various outlandish reasons, derived the symbol for Red Tower Books from the Random House logo, but that story may not be true. Random House never raised the issue of trademark infringement, and Red Tower stopped publishing books in 2002. Coffee with the Red Tower label was produced until 2014.

…and I made new doodads to decorate the Official 2022 Geranium Lake Properties Calendar.

Flared Skelestissim Quatrefoil


Today’s Geranium Lake Properties comic is the featured panel for the month of July in the official 2021 Geranium Lake Properties Calendar. With this calendar, I have finally realized a long-desired ambition to include the major Jackalopian holidays celebrated by Jack Loki, the protean protagonist of the GLP universe. If you decide to purchase one (or more) I recommend that you change only the size option if you wish. The design looks great with both the Medium or Large sizes of the Two Page calendar. I do not recommend the small size or the Single Page calendar.

The picture above shows the Medium size with the Classic Frameless grid. None of the other grid styles will print correctly with the layout of the holidays. Modern Stars might work, but I did not test print a calendar with that option. The calendar features twelve GLP comics on the front and back covers, plus twelve more inside, one for each month of the year. Which gives you a total of twenty-four different GLP comics printed in glorious color.


If you want to wait for a sale on calendars, Zazzle is sure to have one before Christmas. Right now, Zazzle is having a 25% off everything sale. Code is SEASONALSAVE. The sale ends October 6, 2020, at one minute before midnight, Pacific Time.

6EQUJ5

The Kiusaaminen of a Cheapjack Benevolence


Also published under the title “Looks Sweet, Tastes Bitter”.

I still have some modifications to make, but the 2021 Geranium Lake Properties calendar with extra special Jackalopian holidays is looking good at this point.

6EQUJ5