The church and agrarian calendars, which in the course of Christianization gradually merged, served as the basic grounds for time-reckoning in pre-modern Europe. In Russian Orthodox Karelia, the church calendar with its regular sequences of ordinary (arki) days, days of fast and holy days, together with fixed seasonal work periods fundamentally structured people's use of time. This is to a certain extent reflected in the vernacular names of the months and the annual arki, non-fasting periods, which refer to the agricultural activity of the time period, such as cutting down forest for slash and burn cultivation (huuhta), hay-making, sowing and harvesting.

The celestial bodies, the sun, the moon and the stars served as reference points for the daily scheduling of farm labour. The position of the sun, or the ‘triple star’ – three stars in the constellation of Orion – told people in northern Karelia when it was time to rise. Other daily tasks, particularly in summertime, were synchronized with the movements of the sun. At Vilho Jyrinoja's home, the house functioned as a sun clock: when the sun shone through the window by the door along a notch carved in the window pane, it was nine o'clock. When it had moved to the side window, shining straight across the floor boards, it was noon. The sun shining through the back window along the floor boards indicated that it was six o'clock in the evening. When the sun had reached the window on the women's side of the room, shining straight from the neighbour's fishing ground, it was nine o'clock in the evening (Virtaranta 1958: 247–250).