Time until Christmas

Christmas Day falls on 25 December every year, so the date is fixed even though the weekday moves. It is a public holiday across most of Europe, the Americas and the Commonwealth, and where the 25th lands on a weekend many countries give the following Monday off instead. This countdown targets midnight at the start of 25 December in your own zone, which is the moment people mean when they count sleeps. Orthodox churches on the Julian calendar keep Christmas on 7 January.

Most of the planning that hangs on the date happens weeks earlier. Postal services publish last posting dates for December delivery in late November or early December, courier cut-offs land a few days after that, and a shop that sells out of a specific item rarely restocks in the final fortnight. School terms in Britain and Ireland usually break up in the week before the 25th, and many offices run on low staffing from then until the new year. Roads, trains and flights are busiest on the two days before Christmas Eve rather than on the 25th itself, when public transport in several countries stops altogether. If you are counting down for a practical reason rather than a sentimental one, the date worth watching is usually a week or two ahead of the one on this page.

In the Philippines the season is stretched further than anywhere else, with carols and decorations appearing from the start of September. Ethiopian Genna is kept on 7 January under the local calendar and is marked with an overnight church service rather than an exchange of gifts. In Japan, where few people are Christian, the 25th is an ordinary working day that has acquired a fried chicken dinner and an evening aimed at couples. The detail people get wrong is the twelve days of Christmas, which run from the 25th onwards rather than ending on it, so a tree taken down on Boxing Day comes down early rather than late.

The next one falls on Friday, 25 December 2026, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

No gospel gives a date. The 25th appears first in a Roman almanac compiled in 354 and was in general use across the West by the end of that century, three hundred years after the events it marks. One explanation is that it was placed to answer the winter festivals already on the calendar, Saturnalia and the birthday of the unconquered sun. The other is that it was counted back nine months from 25 March, the date the early church gave to the conception. Both have been argued for a very long time and neither has won.

Most of what looks ancient about the modern festival is Victorian. Decorated trees came from German-speaking Europe and spread in Britain after an engraving of Victoria and Albert standing round one was printed in 1848. Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843, Henry Cole sent the first commercial Christmas card the same year, and the railways made it possible to travel to a family and still be at work afterwards. The American Santa Claus was assembled over the same century out of Father Christmas and the Dutch Sinterklaas, and illustrators had settled him in a red suit long before any advertiser used one.