Bo, Buns and the Vineyard: Hundreds of Ways to Keep Time

Ah, it used to be so simple. Winter meant Charlie Brown getting hit in the back of his smooth, round noggin with a fat snowball. Spring was Charlie Brown losing another battle with the kite-eating tree. By July, he was whiffing in the bottom of the ninth, and every autumn it was back-to-school love with the little red-haired girl.

In the good old days, it seemed that funny gift calendars were so much more accessible; their appeal, so much broader. You went into the drug store and grabbed cartoons for the kids and nature scenes for Grandma. Even if you shopped at a big place like the Coop, there weren't more than 25 choices as recently as a few years ago, sales people say.

But today, the Macy's of Harvard Square offers 200 varieties in a special two-floor bazaar of the seasons. You could spend hours there and never get past March. How could anyone know whether Granny would prefer Vermont Life, New Hampshire Profiles, Cape Cod and the Islands or Martha's Vineyard?

And that's just the start. You've got your puppies and your bunnies, and of course your cats: Garfield and Sourpuss headline here. For a further refinement of the field, you need only examine the various offerings of anti-pet propaganda. Kill the cats, mangle the cats, use dead cats as bowling pins, and so on.

For the sports enthusiast, there's The Macmillan Baseball Calendar, which includes key dates from the past as well as those coming up next year. On October 20, 1910, for example, cork-centered baseballs were used for the first time. Stick that in some trivia expert's pipe and have him smoke it.

The conventional soft-porn girlie calendars are available only in select stores and newsstands, but male beefcake abounds this year. In A Woman Looks at Men's Buns, photographer Christie Jenkins gives a cheeky tour of some rather hairy backsides. She provides a most unusual perspective on Terrance eating ice cream, T. J. and Sal sunning, and J.D. straddling his motorcycle.

There's something for health nuts and Harvard nuts, Tolkien nuts and television nuts. You can get a big glossy of Bo Derek in her birthday suit, which has nothing else aside from thin lines etched against her flesh and numerals for each month. If it's July, this must be Bo's. . .

In short, you can't count on calendars anymore as your easy no-decision stocking stuffer. Charlie Brown, where have you gone?