The Samhain 2011 - 2012 Calendar is on its way

As Debbie puts the final touches on our 2011-2012 Samhain Calendar I thought I'd take the opportunity to blog about it.   This is our fifth Pagan calendar and each year it seems to get just a little bit easier.  Debbie is such a pro at formatting the calendar now.  What sometimes takes the longest is deciding the theme for each calendar.  Once we've sorted that then it's onto the artwork.   What do we want our artwork to be of or look like?  Is it something we need to set up a lot of costumes and models for as well as hooking up a photographer?

This time we decided to focus on the moon so we enlisted the help of our very talented friend Steve Buller who spent a few months taking photos of the moon for us.  Thanks Steve :)

After the decision on artwork is done Debbie and I take different roles.  She has the technical and often times (especially when I make last minute requests) finicky job of formatting the calendar and doing all the astrology calculations.  All the wonderful work that makes the calendar actually become a calendar is at her hand.  In addition, she adds the festival days and researches what holidays/festivals/feast days fall when from as many different paths as she can find.

My job is to write the content for the calendar.  The blurbs that are found under the photos, the tiny tidbits of information that can be found scattered throughout, like the monthly moon myths we have, are my domain.  To be honest, I think I got the easy job.  And I'm not giving it up lol.

The calendar is usually done much earlier than this, but due to unfortunate circumstances, in the form of a rumbling earth, we're a little behind schedule, but that can't be helped.

Once I've finished here I'll update the website to show the upcoming release of the calendar and to enable pre-orders.  

Looking at the calendar file from Debbie while I was helping to proof it, I realised that there are a large number of festivals and feast days that I have no knowledge of.  So it has inspired me to spend this coming year looking into each of the festival and feast days that are featured and blogging about them.  This will get interesting, as I've noticed that some days are quite busy lol.