Time for one of the most delightful of activities ... choosing a new calendar!

It's a weakness, perhaps, but I simply love calendars. However, I am supremely picky about them. What a shock, eh?

I like a weekly planner (seeing a whole month's worth of obligations at a glance overwhelms me). I like a coil bound calendar so I can fold it up as small as possible. Also I'm ruthless about ripping out pages once a week has gone by, which coil binding makes easy.

This year I wanted to try to find a calendar that would tell me the Mass reading for each day. Any calendar like that would naturally include feast days (or so it seemed to me). It didn't need to be big. I prefer a really tiny calendar, but accept the fact that those are hard to find because most people want more room to write.

After looking around on the internet for a while, I found Family Centered Media's Catholic Daily Planner.

A useful, annual resource designed to help you live your Faith and order your life – every day! Each day lists feasts and ferias as well as the liturgical color proper to the day for both forms of the liturgy.

The weekly pages are formatted with plenty of space to record all of your tasks and appointments. Blank lined journal pages, contact/address book pages and weblog all help you order your life.

Liturgical observances (i.e. First Sunday of Advent, memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows, etc); Mass reading citations for every day (ordinary form); holy days of obligation; First Friday and Saturday devotions; and daily rosary mystery reminders.

All true.

Plus there are a few pages in the front that help decode things (for example I didn't know that "feria" means a day has no feast or vigil ... but I do now!). The daily prayer pages have some simple, basic Catholic prayers that anyone can memorize and use at the appropriate time of day to stay connected with God. These are basics but something I hadn't ever practiced regularly. I think I am going to give that a shot with the New Year.

Each month is prefaced with a spread that shows the entire month's layout. This page also has the Papal Prayer Intentions for that month.

Most of the weekly spreads have an inspirational quote from the Pope or a saint. There is a little note in the corner of each day telling which decade of the rosary to say, if you like to follow the recommended order (I don't, but I'm not rosary-centric either ... being rather hit or miss in whether I feel moved for that particular meditation.)

There are nine cover images you can choose from.  All are lovely. I chose the most subdued but was tempted by many of them.

I like the basic calendar layout. If you want, you can pay a little extra to have a menu planner add-on.

There is a large version as well, but you know already that I got the small one, right?

There are images of inside pages although they don't enlarge very much. But they do give you an idea of the page layout so you can get a sense of whether it would work for you.

I am well pleased, which is no easy feat as y'all may know,  and am looking forward to using this calendar in 2011.