You don't need a temporary table, but you do need a table that actually contains dates to select from. That's easy enough, but what I would really like to do is to select a list of dates from a table that doesn't exist. Similar to how you can SELECT 5+5 and get 10 without selecting from a table. I'd like to be able to say

SELECT date WHERE date BETWEEN start_date AND end_date AND DAY(date)='Wednesday';