Church calendar meets e-calendar

As you're organizing your calendar for the upcoming year, consider adding the saint of the day. Of course, you can write each day's feast on your paper calendar or planner, but you might want to make a more permanent record by adding them to a calendar on your computer. Many email programs (MSN, and Gmail, among others) have built-in calendars. Pull your Lives of the Saints or favorite saint book off the shelf, grab a cup of coffee, and spend a couple hours on this project. Here's a few tips I've discovered after doing this a few times:

• You can enter a saint for every day, or just start by entering particularly meaningful patrons.
• Feel free to enter just the names, or go ahead and enter a detail or two ("Virgin Martyr," or "Bishop of ___").
• One of the greatest advantages of this system is that you can set it to repeat annually. Be sure to enable this for each day, or you'll have to redo your calendar every year!
• You can also set the calendar to send you an email or text message reminder ahead of time. Set it to remind you a few days ahead of time for a child's name day, or just make it such that you wake up each morning to a little reminder.
• You're not just limited to entering saints! My mom gets a steady stream of email reminders for godchildrens' Baptismal days (again, the annual repeat feature makes this project a great investment of your time).
• Don't feel obligated to enter the whole year at once. Spending 20 minutes or so at the end of each month will prepare you for the month ahead.

The investment of a little time and effort into this project will pay off through the year as you find reminders of the Church's feasts mixed in with the reminders of your daily life!