Even though the JavaDoc does not contain a hint about it, Calendars are inherently unsafe for multihtreaded use. Sharing a single instance across thread boundaries without proper synchronization will result in erratic behavior of the application. Under 1.4 problems seem to surface less often than under Java 5 where you will probably see random ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsExceptions or IndexOutOfBoundsExceptions in sun.util.calendar.BaseCalendar.getCalendarDateFromFixedDate().
You may also experience serialization problems.
Using an instance field is recommended.
For more information on this see Sun Bug #6231579 and Sun Bug #6178997.