How to add Ajax to the default widget calendar to support next/previous months loading?

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Interesting task indeed. Here’s what I would do:

  1. Create my own plugin with a widget. You can always use plugin boilerplate or widget boilerplate as starting points.
  2. My widget would look like the default calendar, except it would also have the ‘prev”https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/”next’ links, as you mentioned.
  3. I would then copy-paste and adjust the get_calendar() function located in wp-includes/general-template.php, which is responsible for populating the calendar HTML. I’d call it something nice and unique, like my_get_calendar().
  4. Connect my widget with my function via AJAX calls triggered by clicks on ‘prev”https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/”next’ links, passing month and year as parameters. The my_get_calendar() function would catch those and return either JSON or HTML (depending on where you prefer the markup generation to occur – either in the front-end or back-end).
  5. In my widget’s JS on document.ready I would call my back-end function to initially populate the calendar, and then attach click handlers to ‘prev”https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/”next’ links.
  6. Share end result with the world by either posting it on GitHub or in WordPress plugins repository, or both.