Let ’em hang!

Whether you wake up at 5 a.m. on New Year's Day to tighten your running shoes and keep your resolutions, or you beat the alarm clock over your champagne-injured head at noon, you're at least going to need to know what day it is, now and pretty much for the rest of 2008.

Fortunately, the ambitious entrepreneurs and cultural organizations of Northern Nevada have figured out how to raise a few bucks for their projects while they help you look like the savvy local gift-giver you aspire to be, by publishing their own 2008 calendars.

This year, don't even think about picking up a shrink-wrapped cheese spread at the last minute. Instead, give everyone on your list a 2008 calendar. You can shop locally (right from your keyboard, actually), get to know some people in your community, and revel in the fact that Northern Nevada is an equal-opportunity-cheesecake region, where women and men alike pose their hot bods for charity. (And, for anyone out there who likes their calendars without scantily clad men or women, there are historical Nevada calendars, too.)

Calendar girls
If you saw Brenda Cox walking down the street, you might not immediately think, “Hmmm, she looks like a professional pole-dancing instructor.” She’s a sporty blonde of average height and a build that’s more like “generally fit” than “alarming, like Kate Moss.” But heels, make-up and attitude really are all they’re cracked up to be. In the 2008 Exotic Calendar, the owner of The Exotic Workout Studio and her students—ordinary women by day, flirtatious vixens when the portrait lights come on—look like they’re going to set the pages on fire, reminding us 12 times over that staying in shape is cool, and staying in shape while spinning around a stripper pole is even cooler.

2008 Exotic Calendar
$25
Available at www.bodiesbybrenda.com

If you think the nice ladies of Carson City who are over 50 sit around in high-necked Victorian collars sipping decaf, it’s time to expand your way of looking at things. When a member of their community—a young mom with some expensive medical bills—needed help, these buxom babes came to the rescue by baring all. Well, baring most. You really have to credit the big-hearted, good-sported Carson Calendar Girls with a finely honed sense of artistic balance; even though their pictures are spiced with naughty abandon, these tastefully campy boudoir shots are PG-rated.

The Carson Calendar Girls - 2008 - The Best Is Yet To Come
$20
Visit www.carsoncalendargirls.com to purchase online or to see a list of retailers in Carson City and Virginia City.

Calendar guys
Men, how do you get to wear a skirt without technically cross-dressing? Ladies, where can you find an opportunity to admire men in dresses without visiting a drag club? No, it’s not a Zen koan; it’s the eternally handsome Scottish kilt. As the men of the Nevada Society of Scottish Clans have always known, a nice pleated wool tartan is one of the most versatile fashion statements available. Whether you’re waxing your mustache into an obedient curlicue, relaxing in the study with a dram of whisky, or dressing it up with snowboard boots and a turtleneck on a snowy slope, the kilt looks good on any occasion. And the Men In Kilts 2008 Calendar can keep you reminded of any occasion, at least if you’re keeping track of NSSC club meetings and Scottish holidays.

Men in Kilts 2008
$15
To pick one up (a calendar), attend any Nevada Society of Scottish Clans event, visit nvssc.org, email club member Anne Macko at regchick1@aol.com, or drop by 1135 Terminal Way, Suite 106.

2008 Wild Men of Wild Nevada
$20
Available at Sundance Books, Dharma Books and other retailers, or online at www.wildnevada.org.

Hold the cheesecake
If you are among those holiday shoppers who favor something a little more cerebral over pics of hot bods, there’s much more to our culture than scantily clad babes and hunks. We also have local history.

If you want to rule in your team’s next Trivial Pursuit tournament, or if you just want to know what the Truckee Meadows looked like before McMansions and neon, check out Nevada Historic Mining Calendar, published each year by the Society for Metallurgical Mining Engineering and the Keck Mine Museum at the University of Nevada, Reno. Each year features a theme from Nevada mining history. This year, it’s photos of gold fields between 1904 and 1910, culled from the museum’s collection of historic photos.

The 2008 Nevada Historic Mining Calendar
$10
Available at the Mark Twain Bookstore in Virginia City and the W.M Keck Earth Science and Mineral Engineering Museum in the Mackay School of Mines building at the University of Nevada, Reno

What’s our story? Nevadans have a lot of them, so many it’s hard to meld them into one little narrative. Appropriately, the Our Story 2008 Calendar is a veritable quilt of byte-sized historical facts. (RN&R News Editor Dennis Myers is a contributing researcher.) It’s published by a non-profit group called Our Story, Inc., “created in 1999 to collect, preserve, promote and interpret the artifacts, manuscripts and other ephemera that documents the experience of African-American and other persons of color in Northern Nevada.”

Montages of contemporary Native American dancers or basketmakers added to historic photos of their predecessors tell us that we’re still writing those stories.

Our Story 2008
$10 (plus $3.50 shipping)
Order by by sending a check o P.O. 94292 Reno 89523 or pick one up at Traveler’s Gifts (in the Reno Tahoe International Airport, Concourse B), or Sundance Books.