At Large

Ah, February. The month of love. Flowers and candy and jewelry sales hoping to boost engagement proposals. Those awkward moments in grade school where one is expected to contribute “be my Valentine” wishes to everyone in the class. Boys and girls. Awkward? Doesn’t matter. Be my Valentine. It’s a special time on the calendar.

Which musing led us to become passingly interested in the entire notion of “the calendar.” Celebrating love on a single day dedicated to someone who may or may not have existed 1,800 years ago on what could have been either their birth or death date … seems like a bit of a reach. Who sets the rules?

Long ago and far away

As a human race, we’ve managed to encourage some of our best and brightest to come up with ways of measuring the year. From creations called Kojoda in Central Africa over 10,000 years ago to native efforts in Australia around the same time, the notion of measuring years has been a significant effort. Elamite, Assyrian, Sumerian, Egyptian, Julian, Gregorian … the evolving list of calendars goes on. And, dare we suggest, it continues.

Welcome to the present. Welcome to measuring our years with “The Marketing Calendar.”

Month by month, we move from one carefully choreographed corporate sales and marketing campaign to the next. Since time is merely a concept, let’s start from here and move forward, brazenly ignoring the premise that the year must begin on January 1.

Mark your calendars

March – St. Patrick’s Day celebrations are punctuated with promotions of silly green hats, plastic shamrocks, gallons of Guinness, parades, and dumping green dye into the Chicago River.

Then comes April with Easter … bunnies and chicks, Peeps and Cadbury eggs, flimsy baskets filled with plastic “grass,” and millions of eggs – hard boiled, dyed … then thrown away. Throw Passover in and food marketers find a second reason to push items that normally don’t do well during the rest of the year.

In May, we are inundated with items designed to improve our Memorial Day celebrations, including flags, bunting, and decorations for bicycles to enhance the local parade. College graduations are also popular this month with gift suggestions of pens and watches and special discounts for recent grads on cars they can hardly afford.

June is wedding month. Need we say more? From Walmart to Tiffany’s, please refer to our convenient gift registry to see what the happy couple has selected.

July brings a second wave of patriotic nostalgia, supplemented by boxes of both legal and illegal fireworks sourced from pop-up roadside stands with garish signs for those who feel the local display in the park isn’t quite enough.

August is back-to-school time in earnest. While pre-teens dread heading back to the halls of academia, their parents search the weekly mailbox stuffing sales sheets to see where clothes and shoes and pencils and three-subject notebooks are allegedly on sale. Pencils?

September is the arbitrary start of the holiday season, so Halloween finery gets promoted alongside the furtive displays of Christmas necessities. It’s not too early to pick up the giant skeleton to be hung out of the second-floor window or the string of 1,000 lights soon to be stapled to the fence! October is jammed with more Halloween blitzes including massive amounts of spending on “fun-size” candy, costumes for children and adults alike, and plastic objects depicting graveyards to be judiciously placed in the front yard and strung with fake spiderwebs.

In November, it’s impossible to avoid the holiday marketing tsunami. Thanksgiving means frozen turkeys, huge bags of dry stuffing mix, and mountains of yams crowding the aisles of our neighborhood market in anticipation and encouragement of the indulgent overeating to come. And, Christmas. Don’t forget Christmas shopping. Home for Thanksgiving? It’s “Black Friday,” and, we are urged to gather outside the Target, Best Buy, and Walmart front doors by 6am to take advantage of the sales – while still working through yesterday’s food coma! Interestingly enough, “Black Friday” seems to begin on the last Tuesday of October. Best of luck finding a parking space.

December is all about St. Nick the Spendthrift. By mid-month, there are sales piling up on sales as retail establishments promote their specials in a frenzied attempt to make their numbers for the year. Buy now! 60% off!

January offers no respite. It’s white sales and appliance sales and car sales to get rid of last year’s models and enticements to steal away for a week on a cruise ship before we finally get to … where we started.

February. The month of love. Expensive cards in oversized envelopes that require additional postage. Heart-shaped boxes of stale candy and bouquets of flowers conveniently wrapped and ready for Valentine presentation.

Have we succumbed? Have we followed the unwritten instructions to buy what we were supposed to buy in the time designated to keep The Marketing Calendar on course?

Now, where were those stamps? I need to put extra postage on this card to my ex-sister-in-law’s cousin’s podiatrist. •