PHP - If date is less than next January

Question

I'm to write a function that will return a specific day if it's between two dates... I've been trying to use mktime, but it keeps returning December?

Essentially, I'm trying to do this:

$now = date('F d, Y');

if($now [is Between July of last year and January of next year] ) {

  //Output last day of January in this year

} elseif($now [is Between January of this year and July of this year]) {

  //Output last day of July for next year

}

I'm a little confused on whether I need to be using mktime or strtotime? To determine January of next year, I tried below, but it returned December, 2012?

$jan = date("F,Y", mktime(0, 0, 0, 1, 0, $year+1));