Here it is, just a tad after the half-year anniversary of 2013. Already calendars are coming in the mail for 2014. This seems a bit early, but there is always a race to get them out before the next calendar-sender. By September the season for mailing is over, but calendars are appearing on the counters of a variety of stores and businesses.

The mailed ones will usually have a form within the calendar asking for a donation or pledge for whatever it is they are selling or representing, such as enviro/ecological concerns. My first two have been from Audubon Society and National Wildlife Federation, to which I belong. The package including the calendar frequently comes in its own expensive mailer. I suppose the sixteen dollars that NWF has determined is my “suggested” donation would pay the postage.

I inquired of one enviro-organization how come they were spending so much money on calendars, backpacks, totes, grocery bags, flashlights and other goodies to collect a donation. The answer I was given was that only nine-point-something percent of these offers were ever accepted.

So, if I do the math in a basic fashion, let’s say they send out a million requests. Nine percent would come to 90 thousand people. (I would be part of the “point-something). Is that enough to pay for mailing and gifts of appreciation? I vaguely remember being told they got a special bulk rate for the mailing.

I have written too much about the tree-hugger industry calendars. They are worthy of my penny-pinching donations and I always refuse the gifts.

After this genre of calendar-senders come the telephone/on line/catalog companies. Unlike the two mentioned above, these send calendars with no request for a donation but with advertisements for merchandise ballyhooed as being part of a pre-Christmas Special Sale. This usually blossoms in late August. Many or most of the special sales will offer Free Shipping, which requires a large amount of money.

You might be part of what is called a ”Blind Mailing,” in other words your name has gotten to their data bank and you’ve not ordered from them before, even if you refuse to buy anything from them they have your precious name and address, which of course is a saleable item its own self.

By October the local merchants get into the act and have calendars on their counters. If they are popular calendars, many people grab two. I have no idea of percentages but I would guess most of the calendar takers cut the name of the establishment off when they are ready to hang the calendar. I confess to being one of these, but I have Ulrich’s, Ace Hardware and Les Schwab’s numbers emblazoned on the cover of the telephone book in printed black Sharpie Marker and pruning the name adds to the art.

There is a specialty calendar market out there, whose devotees are fraught with anticipation of its emergence on a rack, or in the mail. In my days of auto rallying, the Pirelli Tire calendar was a must. Those were non-equal-opportunity, non- feminist, male-chauvinistic times and the Pirelli calendar had fantastic pin up girls, as they were called. I shall not explore their attire. There were (and probably are) many imitations, but one I eagerly sought was Ferrari’s which featured . . . Ferraris.

You may have already gotten the first rounds of the calendar onslaught. You ought to save every one of them because as the word went in our family, “Some day that’s gonna be worth a lot of money.”

And they don’t take up much space.