Calendar Tea Towels

Calendar tea towels were common in many New England homes from the 1950s through the 1980s. They made great, inexpensive gifts, came in a multitude of colors and prints and could display the entire year's calendar. Calendar towels would be proudly hung in many kitchens and displayed as a colorful wall hanging which hung from a dowel. When the new year arrived, the linen towel would be recycled into a dish drying towel only to be replaced by the new year's calendar and print. Tea towel is the English term for what Americans call a dish towel. Linen was valued for its drying purposes because it is absorbent, leaves no lint and the more you use them, the softer they become. Stevens Linen Works, a textile mill dating back to 1812 from Dudley, Mass. was the inventor and maker of these calendar towels. They produced a number of products that were made with linen in them. When they found a decline in their plain linen dish towel, an employee came up with the idea of printing the calendar on it and the first linen calendar towels were produced in 1954. The printed towels would often include a kitchen prayer or positive affirmation. Many were printed with scenes of New England including covered bridges, farmhouses, barns, grist mills, roosters, birds, dogs and cats. The towel was sewn with a pocket across the top of it to slide a dowel into and the package included the dowel and string for hanging. When I was growing up, my mom often had a calendar towel hanging in our kitchen that would stay hung as a decorative wall hanging long after that calendar year had passed. I think she liked the lovely prints. I remember many years ago the Summit Sugar House and Gift Barn in Westmoreland used to sell them, and I imagine that's where my mom got ours. That was such a fun place to walk around and look at all the neat things they sold. Somehow, I was lucky enough to find our 1980 calendar towel. It is now a soft piece of linen that has retained its once vibrant print of an old grist mill. These towels remain very popular even today and can be found at vintage shows and on many sites throughout the internet ranging in price from $5.00 to $75.00 (depending on rarity, condition, print and colors). A vintage calendar towel makes a great birthday gift. Find one for the year that the person was born and use it to wrap the gift, include it with a card or pair it with something else the person could use. There are seven years that share the same calendar as 2024. They are: 1940, 1968, 1996, 2052, 2080 and 2120. That means you could purchase a 1968 or 1996 vintage calendar tea towel, hang it in your kitchen right now and the days would match up for this year! Ruth Blais Thompson is a lifelong resident of the Monadnock Region, a Realtor for Blais & Assoc. Realtors in Keene and a volunteer CASA. Her pastimes are writing short stories, ancestry research and playing and writing music. She lives in Dublin with her husband and can be reached at rblaisthompson@gmail.com