Recycle Your Calendar: 1984 = 2012

Somehow we've hoarded a bunch of old calendars, some were used and some not. And I've thought that some of these must work again in future years, but I never worked hard at it.  I guess this is good for recycling and trees, but not so good if you have a capitalist society where spending boosts the economy. 

But knowing that people have put all sorts of information onto the web, and Google helps us get to these places, I checked yesterday to see what year calendar starts on the same day as 2012. This one is tricky, because it's a Leap Year.

I quickly found Time and Date, a website with a number of potentially useful ways to play with time and dates. One page allows you to pick a year and see all the other years that have the same calendar.  Here's the list for 2012 and beyond.

Year	Compared to year 2012	Since last
1928	84 years before
1956	56 years before	+ 28 years
1984	28 years before	+ 28 years
2012	selected year	+ 28 years
2040	28 years after	+ 28 years
2068	56 years after	+ 28 years
2096	84 years after	+ 28 years
2108	96 years after	+ 12 years

Please note that holidays will not match exactly.

So,  we have to go back 28 years to George Orwell's ominous 1984 to find a calendar that will match 2012.  Or, if you have a 1956 calendar, that will do as well. 

So I went downstairs and pulled out all the old calendars I could find.  And I actually had a 1984 calendar.  This was given to me by a relative who knew I had an interest in plants.  It's a Wild Flowers of Chile calendar.  (In Spanish and English.)

This turns out to be an unused diary style calendar.  But I imagine if you have a used calendar, it might be interesting to see what you did in that previous year as you mark down this year's events.  You just have to find a distinctively colored pen for this year.



So, if you have a pile of calendars, here are some of the years that will work for the next five years.

Current Year	Old Matching Calendar Years
2012	1928, 1956, 1984  (Leap Year)
2013	1985, 1991, 2002
2014	1986, 1997, 2003
2015	1987, 1998, 2009
2016	1932, 1960, 1988  (Leap Year)
2017	1989, 1995*, 2006

HTML Tables

*See comments Dec 17, 2016

There are also some interesting patterns.  Leap Years seem to return every 28 years (though after 2096 there's a 12 year bump.)  For the other years, there are lots of 11 and 6 year bumps.

There are a lot of interesting things on Time and Date and they appear to all be free.  Here's some info from their Founder's Page:

About Steffen Thorsen

Steffen Thorsen is the CEO of Time and Date AS, the company that maintains timeanddate.com. Steffen lives in Sandnes, near Stavanger, Norway.

My company

This site is operated by "Time and Date AS" which is a private Norwegian company.
Steffen and his staff can be contacted at: webmaster@timeanddate.com. If you have any queries or comments, email is the preferred way of communication initially.

My intentions with this site

I want this website to be a free, informational, continuously updated and accurate service available all over the world. Over the years, timeanddate.com has gone from a hobby project to my primary occupation, which encompasses enhancing and developing new services, as well as responding to emails from users worldwide. However, these are not my only tasks. I have other responsibilities in proactively ensuring that the company meets its annual goals and objectives. As the company’s leader, I am responsible for utilizing, fostering and expanding our resources and ensuring smooth operations within the company. Ultimately, I want to provide value to the people who use this website. The project originally started in 1995, with the World Clock, Calendar and countdown to year 2000 on my old Unix account, which I used when I was a university student. In 1998 and 1999 the services gradually moved to the timeanddate.com domain, and the services on the old account were eventually discontinued in 1999. On May 24, 2008, we celebrated the 10th anniversary of timeanddate.com. You can read about timeanddate.com’s 10th birthday, which also provides the history of this website. Also see the history behind The World Clock.