SLP Calendar vs. West End Bakery’s Late December

An In-Depth Postgame Analysis

This calendar went for $24.99 on an online auction. We had the winning bid. We also won knowledge–

Knowledge that our SLP calendar is superior.

Let’s look at the facts.

Many people have celiac disease.

This calendar pounds people with gluten.

Our calendar does not.

This calendar came out in 1929 and ushered America–and the world– out of the roaring 20s and into a Great Depression that culminated in a World War.

Our calendar does not.

If this highly-coveted calendar with all of its faults sold for $24.99 in a very no-holds-barred, bare knuckled (at least there was no specified regulations about holds or knuckle covers in the auction rules) online auction, how much would our calendar be valued at in similar circumstances?

Impossible to tell.

Plus if we consider that one dollar in 1929 had the equivalent of $17.79 in purchasing power today (when we looked it up on our local inflation calculator in late June, 2023–and the number is only higher whenever you are reading this) and we multiple 24.99 x 17.79 than our SLP calendar is worth, at a minimum, $444.57.

Then, you must consider the fact that when we received this calendar, it only had the month of January. So multiple 444.57 x 12 and our SLP calendar is worth, at a bare minimum, $5,333.84.

Yet, we offer it for you here on the SLP website for free.

And we don’t even ask the IRS for a tax write-off for our generosity.

This does not even take into account the art—Old Ironsides—by William Steeple Davis featured on the West End Bakery Calendar. If we started getting into that value and multiplying it in order to determine any sort of real value for the SLP Calendar, things would just get really crazy. The numbers would get too big to keep this analysis from getting unnecessarily long.

But speaking of Old Ironsides, the boat that sparked so much artistic expression, such as this poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.:

Aye tear her tattered ensign down

Long has it waved on high,

And many an eye has danced to see

That banner in the sky;

Beneath it rung the battle shout,

And burst the cannon's roar;—

The meteor of the ocean air

Shall sweep the clouds no more.

Her deck, once red with heroes' blood,

Where knelt the vanquished foe,

When winds were hurrying o'er the flood,

And waves were white below,

No more shall feel the victor's tread,

Or know the conquered knee;—

The harpies of the shore shall pluck

The eagle of the sea!

Oh, better that her shattered hulk

Should sink beneath the wave;

Her thunders shook the mighty deep,

And there should be her grave;

Nail to the mast her holy flag,

Set every threadbare sail,

And give her to the god of storms,

The lightning and the gale!”

One has to wonder: “If Old Ironsides inspired such a poem by Holmes, what would our SLP Calendar have inspired in him?”

That is an easy question to answer:

A better poem.

And so the SLP Calendar not only defeats the West End Bakery’s Late December, it also—at the same time—defeats Old Ironsides, one of the famous war ships of all time.

Can your calendar do that?

Yes, if it is a SLP Calendar.