The article aims to assess the social and mentalistic history of the Debreczeni Magyar Kalendáriom (“Hungarian Calendar of Debrecen”), edited by Mihály Fazekas for ten years, based upon its short prose texts. The predecessors of the stories in the calendar are mostly German literary texts, or they were taken over from German calendars and anecdote collections, most of which were parables. The majority of the texts belong to the genres of anecdote, but there are also fables, paramyths, short story tales, jokes and crime stories. The purpose behind rewriting the texts in a parable form was to educate the readers to have a practical point of view, as well as to help them with moral orientation. The ideology of Volklsaufklärung is behind the writing of the texts. Fazekas’s knowledge of German literature also takes us closer to the source of his masterwork, Lúdas Matyi, an epic poem. At the turn of the 19th-20th century positivist and literary historical researches connected the work with literary predecessors. The work having a peasant oral tradition would have suited better the Marxist approach in the 1950s, which tried to focus the understanding of the work to the plebeian-patrician conflict, however, only one folklore data was collected to support their claim. The article argues that the story had various written versions in Hungary and Europe in Fazekas’s age, and Fazekas willingly borrowed from contemporary literary pieces and popular readings, thus the written origin cannot be excluded. At the same time, the written sources may indicate the presence of the story in oral form, therefore it is not unlikely that the author might have heard it at one of his posts.