Working out the ‘day of the week’ for any date is relatively straight forward. If we ignore leap years for the moment, any year will follow one of seven different patterns of dates — each pattern depending on the 'day of the week' on which 1 January falls. Once you know this, you can work out the ‘day of the week’ for any date in that year. For example, in 2006 New Year's Day falls on a Sunday, which means that the first Sunday in February will fall on the 5 February, the first Sunday in March will fall on the 5 March, the first Sunday in April will fall on the 2 April... For convenience we'll give each of the seven patterns a letter ‘A–G’. Table D1 gives the date pattern for the years 2001–2010 and Table D2 gives the first Sunday of the month for each of the date patterns. 2001 B 2002 C 2003 D 2004 EF 2005 G 2006 A 2007 B 2008 CD 2009 E 2010 F Table D1: Date Patterns for years 2001–2010 Notice that leap years have a double date pattern. For example, 2008 has the pattern ‘CD’ which means that pattern ‘C’ should be used for January and February and pattern ‘D’ should be used for the rest of the year.   J F M A M J J A S O N D A 1 5 5 2 7 4 2 6 3 8 5 3 B 7 4 4 1 6 3 1 5 2 7 4 2 C 6 3 3 7 5 2 7 4 1 6 3 1 D 5 2 2 6 4 1 6 3 7 5 2 7 E 4 1 1 5 3 7 5 2 6 4 1 6 F 3 7 7 4 2 6 4 1 5 3 7 5 G 2 6 6 3 1 5 3 7 4 2 6 4 Table D2: First Sunday of the month for each date pattern As an example we’ll work out which ‘day of the week’ 17 December 2008 falls on. Now, 2008 is a leap year which means that we use pattern ‘C’ for January and pattern ‘D’ for the rest of the year. Using pattern ‘D’, we can see that the first Sunday in December falls on the 7th, so the second Sunday will fall on the 14th and — the 17 December 2008 will fall on a Wednesday. We have produced a dates program that calculates the date of Easter, other moveable holidays, fixed holidays, and the day of the week for any date.

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