You say you didn’t get a calendar for Christmas? I, for one, am grateful not to have found one under the tree this year. I didn’t give one to anyone, either. First of all, calendars are too personal to pick out for someone else. Second, they’re too impersonal to be a thoughtful gift – unless you got the idea from someone’s wish list.

That said, a calendar may be the most necessary item in a busy daily life. I can’t live without mine, or rather, I can’t function without consulting mine every morning. At my house, we even have calendar meetings, often on Sunday nights. Can you be at dinner Tuesday? Who’s picking up John at the airport on Friday? Do you know Saturday is Dad’s birthday? Our calendars keep us polite – as well as crazy.

I have two. The first is a garden-variety business day minder that serves as both my daily guide and a diary of sorts. As the year goes by, I collect phone numbers, addresses and random thoughts about life in its pages. These calendars are keepers, and they have their own designated shelf in my home office.

For the wall, I never choose a designer calendar. I go for something that showed up in my bag from the market or when the gas man last filled the tank. These calendars usually have flowers or fragments of poetry and cartoonish icons that mark federal and religious holidays. I don’t pay attention to the symbolism of this calendar largely because it doesn’t dictate identity; it merely serves as a set of 28 to 31 boxes into which I scribble obligations and commitments. Mostly that calendar is a visual reminder about checking my other calendar. I don’t take the wall one seriously.

But maybe you do. If you don’t have a tried-and-true calendar style, the days are ticking by. You don’t want to find yourself calendrically challenged in the first few days of the new year and, this week, most calendars go on sale. So not only is this the best – in fact, the only – time you can gracefully re-gift all the calendars you got and don’t want, it’s also a good time to start shopping for one you do want.

Check out the local bookstores first. Then go online. You might be surprised by the growth in the calendar industry in recent years. One online site features more than 6,000 types. That’s about 16.5 calendars for each day.

Watch “Grey’s Anatomy”? You can get the calendar. A tennis fan? How about Maria Sharapova in monthly bikinis? Got a thing for outhouses, helicopters, grain elevators or Lindsay Lohan? You’re in luck.

One of my co-workers likes the hip “365 Tunes Calendar,” which offers a daily song or play list suggestion. It might be out of date by February, but, if you’re part of the zoomy iPod generation, you probably can download every track by next week.

If you’re sick of van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, Anne Geddes’ newborns and William Wegman’s Weimaraners, options abound. How about 12 months of Cleveland? Who knew it had such picturesque architecture?

Bored with Sudoku? Check out a boxed calendar of Kakuro, the newest logic puzzle to hit brainiacs.

If you’re not a smarty, you’ll be excited to learn that nearly every celebrity has a vanity calendar these days. But the old standards – John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn and even the Three Stooges – are still among the most popular. Do a search: You’ll find your idol’s face, and probably his or her backside and other thinly veiled parts, too.

If you’re an animal person, well, you undoubtedly already have your cat or dog calendar. The only animal calendar I would even consider is one that features coton de tulears dogs. But it’s true, I won’t be rushing right out to purchase the “What Horses Teach Us” calendar anytime soon.

Some calendar art is serious business. Life lessons, historic moments, stark black-and-white portraits: Skip those. And if you have to have a Maine calendar, the perennial favorite comes from Down East Books. Just to contradict myself for a moment: This is about the only calendar I could imagine giving as a gift – belated or otherwise – and then, only to out-of-state friends.

My top choice this year is the George W. Bush “Out of Office Countdown” calendar. Call me a bad sport, but I’m looking for ways to make the next political year pass a little more quickly.