Most Christians celebrate Christmas on December 25. Orthodox Christians in Russia, Serbia and Georgia celebrate it on January 7. It isn’t a second Christmas or a different feast. They celebrate once, on December 25, but they count the date on an older calendar, and that calendar’s December 25 falls on the day most of the world calls January 7.
Is Orthodox Christmas on a different day?
On the calendar most of the world uses, yes. On the Church’s own calendar, no.
Two calendars are still in use. The Gregorian calendar is the one almost the whole world lives by. It is the calendar on your phone, and it has been Russia’s everyday calendar since 1918. The Julian calendar is the older one, from the time of Julius Caesar, and it now runs 13 days behind.
Every Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas, which the Orthodox call the Nativity of Christ, on December 25. The Russian Church and the others that still date their feasts by the Julian calendar celebrate on the Julian December 25, and the Gregorian calendar calls that day January 7. So a Russian Orthodox family has one Christmas, on January 7 by the calendar on its wall. For their Church, December 25 on that wall calendar falls in the 40-day fast before Christmas.
The Greek, Romanian and Bulgarian Churches moved to a corrected calendar in the last century, as did several others, so their December 25 is the same day as everyone else’s.
Why did the old calendar fall behind?
Julius Caesar’s calendar, in use from 45 BC, adds a leap day every fourth year. That makes its year about 11 minutes longer than the time the earth takes to go around the sun, and the minutes add up to about three days every four centuries. By the 1500s the spring equinox, the day in March when day and night are the same length, was arriving 10 days before March 21, its date on the calendar. The Church’s rules for Easter start from that equinox, so Easter was drifting too.
In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII fixed the drift. He cut 10 days out of the calendar, so in Rome the day after October 4 was October 15. That December Rome celebrated Christmas 10 days before the Christians of the East, who were still on the old calendar. Gregory’s calendar also keeps the leap day in only one century year out of four: it had a February 29 in 1600 and 2000 but none in 1700, 1800 or 1900, while the old calendar kept all of them. Each of those three leap days pushed the calendars another day apart, which is why the gap has been 13 days since 1900.
That also answers whether Orthodox Christmas is always on January 7. It isn’t. From 1801 to 1900 it fell on January 6. It will fall on January 7 for the last time in 2100, because the old calendar keeps a leap day that year and the new one does not, and from 2101 it will fall on January 8.
Why didn’t the Orthodox change calendars?
A council in Constantinople turned the reform down in 1583, out of faithfulness to the First Council of Nicaea of AD 325. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America gives Easter as the main reason. Under the new calendar, it says, Easter would sometimes fall together with the Jewish Passover, against the rules of the early Church, as the Orthodox read them. The East also saw the reform as Rome deciding for the whole Church on its own.
The question came back in 1923, when Patriarch Meletius IV of Constantinople called a congress of the Orthodox Churches. The Serbian astronomer Milutin Milanković designed a corrected calendar for it, the “Revised Julian” calendar, whose dates are the same as the Gregorian calendar’s until the year 2800. He wrote that two calendars had proved inconvenient in Romania and in the new kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, where Orthodox and Catholics lived side by side and the holidays “were celebrated twice”. The Churches of Constantinople, Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Poland took it up in 1924, and Bulgaria in 1968. Jerusalem, Russia and Serbia kept the old calendar.
The change reached only the feasts that fall on the same date every year, such as Christmas. Easter moves from year to year. Nearly every Orthodox Church still works it out by the old calendar (the Church of Finland is the best-known exception), so they keep Easter on the same Sunday. The congress had voted to set Easter by the real full moon instead, but no Church ever did.
Which Orthodox Churches celebrate Christmas on January 7?
The Russian, Serbian, Georgian and Macedonian Churches keep Christmas on January 7, and so do the Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the monasteries of Mount Athos. So does the Polish Church, which went back to the old calendar in 2014, and so does the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which has historic ties to Moscow. In the Orthodox Church in America, the Diocese of Alaska keeps January 7 as well. In the Czech Lands and Slovakia, each parish chooses.
These keep it on December 25: the Churches of Constantinople, Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria, Alexandria, Antioch, Albania and Finland, the rest of the Orthodox Church in America, and since 2023 the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, whose parishes may keep the old date. So most Greek Orthodox Christians celebrate on December 25. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem is the exception, which is why Orthodox Christmas in Bethlehem comes on January 7. If you aren’t sure which date your parish keeps, ask your priest.
What about the Copts, Ethiopians and Armenians?
These ancient Churches are a separate family, apart from the Orthodox Churches above since they did not accept the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451. The Copts and Ethiopians keep old calendars of their own. The Coptic Church of Egypt counts Christmas as 29 Kiahk, a day of its own ancient calendar, and the Copts celebrate it on January 7. The Ethiopian Church keeps Christmas on January 7 as well.
The Armenian Church keeps Christmas on January 6 and celebrates Christ’s birth and His baptism in one feast that day. Archbishop Anoushavan (the Armenian Prelate in the eastern United States) calls this “the original tradition of the feast”. John Cassian found the same custom in Egypt in the late 300s, when he lived among its monks. The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem keeps the old calendar, so in the Holy Land the Armenians’ Christmas falls on January 19.
Why December 25 in the first place?
Nobody knows the day Christ was born. Around AD 200 the teacher Clement of Alexandria listed the dates Christians had worked out, which ranged from April to May. The first record of December 25 is a Roman list of the days of martyrs and bishops from the middle 300s. John Chrysostom preached at Antioch on December 25, AD 386, when his church had kept that date for less than 10 years, and he said the West had known it “from the beginning”. Augustine tied it to another date: “For He is believed to have been conceived on the 25th of March, upon which day also He suffered … But He was born, according to tradition, upon December the 25th.”
Some historians think the Church chose the date to replace a Roman feast of the sun, which the emperor Aurelian set on December 25 in AD 274. Others think Christians counted nine months on from the day they believed He was conceived, and that the same count from a different spring date gave the East its January 6. The historian Andrew McGowan sets out both views and concludes, “We cannot be entirely sure.”
What changes for those who keep January 7?
The whole season moves 13 days with it. The 40-day Nativity Fast runs from November 28 to January 6, so New Year’s Eve comes in the middle of a fast. Christmas Eve is January 6, and Theophany, the feast of Christ’s baptism, falls on January 19. Many people in Russia and Georgia also keep an “Old New Year” on January 14, which is January 1 on the old calendar.
Where do Orthodox Christians disagree?
Those who use the new calendar point out that the Council of Nicaea, in the words of Fr Lawrence Farley (a priest of the Orthodox Church in America), “did not in fact mandate the use of the Old Calendar, or in fact any particular civil calendar.” In December 1924 a Greek priest in Ohio told the local newspapers about soldiers of different nations who fought on the same battlefield in the First World War. They found their allies “celebrating Christmas, while some of them waited for their Dec. 25 to come around”.
Those who keep the old calendar see it as the tradition their Churches have always kept. The Russian historian Pavel Kuzenkov calls it “our thousand-year tradition”, and argues that putting the new calendar beside the old Easter leads “to a whole series of liturgical inconsistencies”. The Apostles’ Fast is one of them. It begins about a week after Pentecost, which moves with Easter and so is still dated by the old calendar. It ends on June 29, the feast of Sts Peter and Paul, which the new calendar keeps 13 days sooner. So in a year when Easter comes late, June 29 can arrive before the fast has begun, and the fast disappears. Metropolitan Hilarion of the Russian Church said in 2019 that a change would mean shifting “the entire church calendar”, and added, “Our church people won’t accept this.”
Whichever calendar they keep, all of them sing the same hymns on the same feast, such as “Christ is born, glorify Him”.
