I made a mistake and didn't notice that the weekday abbreviations (S, M, T, W, T, F, S) were not showing up along the top row. I finally figured out what was causing that: the phrase group that's loaded needs to include 'calendar'. And the $phrasegroups variable needs to be updated
before global.php is included.
So for example at the top of index.php you'll see:
PHP Code:
$phrasegroups = array('holiday');
which needs to be
PHP Code:
$phrasegroups = array('holiday', 'calendar');
in order for the days to show up.
There's probably a nice clean way to do this in vbulletin that is more modular and doesn't involve editing code in as many places, but for me this is now working.