Tomorrow, Thursday, is Ascension Day and in Iceland that means it’s a “red day”, i.e. I get the day off as do most people who have 9 to 5 jobs.

A “red day” refers to the calendar, where the dates of such bank holidays are always marked with red.

Yet, to me it’s a little confusing. I’m neither color blind or dense but red days are usually not red in my mind.

As a kid, I remember our daily routine of ripping off each date of the calendar hanging on a wall in our dining room, just above the light switch. The background was usually some pretty landscape picture and beneath it was the thick stack of days that we tore off as time passed.

I think we bought our calendar from the Lions Club, as my dad was a member.

For a long while, it was my ambition to rip off the days and I sometimes had to constrain myself to only do it once a day. Each scrap had the month written at the top, a huge number in the middle and the day of the week written under it.

It helped me learn how to count, learn the names of the months and weekdays as well as how they were written.

Then I sometimes saved up a number of them and used them as money notes when I was playing store.

As I learnt to read, I got a little puzzled by the calendar, though.

You see, “red days” were always written entirely in red, the name of the month, weekday and number.

So Sunday was always red, and so were days like the 17th of June (Iceland’s National Day); the 1st of May, Labor Day; the first Monday of August, the Merchants’ Holiday, and then all the religious days of course, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Ascension Day, etc.

But as far back as I can remember words have had different colors in my head. And as a kid I thought it was the same with everyone else and that all words had a universally-agreed-upon association with colors.

The Icelandic word for Sunday is sunnudagur and that’s definitely not a red word; it’s a deep sort of navy blue color with a hint of purple, darkening at the end (because dagur (“day”) is a dark-grey word). So that threw me off right away.

And because in Iceland the Mondays after Easter Sunday and Whitsunday are always bank holidays too, they were written in red on the calendar, despite the fact that mánudagur (“Monday”) is a sapphire blue, again turning dark at the end.

Good Friday couldn’t possibly be red as föstudagur (“Friday”) has a bright, sparkling orange color with a hint of bright green. And as it’s called “Friday the Long” in Icelandic, it has the suffix -langi, which has the light-grayish color of a white smoke. Everybody knows that.

Well, Ascension Day in Icelandic is Uppstigningardagur and is made up of three words; upp, meaning “up”, stigningar, the genitive case of stigning, which derives from the Icelandic verb for “step”, and, obviously, dagur, a dark-grey word.

So, upp is a violet word to me, stigningar is a light-silver word and dagur is dark-grey, so combined, Uppstigningardagur is a rather long streak of purple-going-dark-with-a-bit-of-silvery-tinsel. It’s hard to explain, actually.

On top of that, Ascension Day is always a Thursday, which is fimmtudagur in Icelandic and, in my mind, has a dark-grey color with a hint of navy blue in the middle which then goes dark-grey again.

How it could possibly be a red day was an utter, everlasting enigma to me.

I could not fathom how calendar-makers could get things so wrong. In fact, not one single day of the week sounds red to me.

And the rest of them are certainly not simply black as the ink used to print them. Nor are any of the names of the months and not nearly all the numbers from 1 to 31.

A long time later I figured out that not everybody sees a color in each word. It was after I became an adult and heard something about this musician who mentioned in an interview that he sees different colors in each note.

Not surprising to me at all, I brought this up at a family gathering shortly after, just to check if we weren’t all on the same page about this. Sure enough, my brother and sister totally associate colors with words as well.

However, we did discover that we don’t see the same colors in the words; usually none of us agreed on one single word as we went through a list of them and compared notes. I found that interesting.

I found it even more interesting when my sister-in-law and brother-in-law, who had been silently following the conversation, looked at each other, shook their heads and chuckled, not having the slightest clue what we were on about!

I don’t have a calendar hanging on my wall anymore. If I need to check the date I use the digital one in my laptop, where none of the days are red and my Sundays are navy blue with a hint of purple, no matter what anyone says.

So, if you have the day off tomorrow, I hope you enjoy it, whatever color it is!

Ingibjörg Rósa Björnsdóttir – ingibjorgrosa@gmail.com