Days Until Christmas

Christmas Day is 25 December every year, so the only question is how far away that is right now — and this page keeps the answer live to the second, counting to midnight at the start of Christmas Day in your own time zone.

Shops start their countdowns absurdly early for a reason: the gap between "it's ages away" and "it's this week" is where all the planning happens. The weekday matters too — a Friday Christmas gives most people a long weekend, while a midweek one splits the holidays in two.

The 25 December date is a choice rather than a record. The gospels give no date, and the first firm attestation of a 25 December celebration appears in a Roman almanac of 354. Two explanations compete: that it was set nine months after 25 March, the date some early Christians assigned to the conception, or that it absorbed the existing midwinter festivals of Saturnalia and Sol Invictus. Orthodox churches following the Julian calendar mark it on 7 January by the Gregorian reckoning, which is why Christmas happens twice across a fortnight in much of the world.

Most of what feels ancient about the modern celebration is Victorian. The decorated tree arrived in Britain with German influence and was popularised by an 1848 illustration of the royal family; the commercial Christmas card dates from 1843, the same year as A Christmas Carol; and the red-suited Father Christmas was standardised by illustration through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries rather than by any single advertiser, contrary to a persistent story about a soft-drink company.

For planning, the weekday matters more than the date. Christmas on a Tuesday or Thursday produces the awkward single working day that many workplaces simply close; on a weekend, several countries move the public holiday to the following Monday. The five-year table below shows which weekday each year lands on, which is usually what people are actually checking when they count the days.

Christmas — the next five years