Time until the first day of winter

Astronomical winter in the northern hemisphere begins at the December solstice, the shortest day of the year and the point where daylight starts lengthening again. The instant falls on 21 or 22 December depending on the year, so this countdown uses 21 December as an approximation. Meteorological winter starts on 1 December. The earliest sunset and the latest sunrise do not happen on the solstice itself, which is why evenings begin drawing out before the mornings do.

The solstice is the shortest day and daylight begins returning from it, but the earliest sunset falls a week or two before the date and the latest sunrise a week or two after, a consequence of the tilt of the earth and its uneven speed around the sun. Practically the date sits in the middle of the busiest week of the year for travel and post, so it passes with little attention outside places that mark it deliberately. Newgrange in Ireland runs a lottery for places at the sunrise. Several traditions attach a meal or a festival to the longest night, including the Persian Yalda and the Chinese Dongzhi. South of the equator the same moment is the longest day, which is why an Australian Christmas falls at the height of summer rather than in the dark.

Ireland puts winter in November, December and January, opening it at Samhain, so the solstice falls in the middle of the Irish season and at the beginning of the British one. Sweden defines the season by temperature rather than by the calendar at all: it is declared locally once the daily mean has held below freezing for five days running, which means it reaches Kiruna weeks before Malmo and in some years never reaches Malmo. Japan's traditional calendar opens winter in early November. The three answers can sit seven weeks apart in the same country.

The next one falls on Monday, 21 December 2026, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

Newgrange in County Meath was raised about 3200 BC, older than Stonehenge and older than the pyramids. A narrow opening above the entrance lets the rising midwinter sun run the length of a nineteen-metre passage and light the chamber at the far end for about a quarter of an hour, on the solstice and the few mornings either side of it. Places inside are allocated by a public lottery that draws tens of thousands of entries for a few dozen spaces. Maeshowe in Orkney is aligned on the setting sun of the same days rather than the rising one.

Festivals of the long night are widespread and mostly concern food and light. Yalda in Iran is spent awake with pomegranates, watermelon and the poetry of Hafez. Dongzhi in China and its Korean and Vietnamese equivalents are marked with rice balls or red bean porridge. Saint Lucy's day in Sweden on 13 December is carried by candles and fell on the solstice itself under the Julian calendar. The Nordic jul, a cousin of the English word yule rather than its source, belongs to the same dark weeks and was in place long before Christmas arrived to sit on top of it.