Christmas is a Christian celebration which has been celebrated since Antiquity. It celebrates Jesus Christ’s birthday, the Messiah in the Christian religion. All Christians in the world (and even some atheists) celebrate and it’s a very important date in the Christian calendar. Around the world, a lot of different traditions, rituals and customs are linked to this celebration date. And each country, region or even city has its own customs. But if all these people celebrate the same thing in the beginning, that is to say a birthday, there exists two principal versions about this birthday date: some place it on the 24th of December, other place it on the 6th of January.

Christian religion is composed of many movements, but the situation can be roughly summarized as follows: a part of Orthodox Christians (including the Orthodox Churches of Russia, Egypt, Poland or Macedonia) celebrate Christmas in January, and the other Christians celebrate it in December. This represents approximately 12% of Christians who celebrate Christmas in January, mainly in Eastern Europe and Middle East. But if at the beginning the sense of this celebration is the same for everybody, why don’t they choose the same date? We will see that if at the beginning the date was the same, historical reasons explain this difference.

If the difference between the two Christmases is not linked to religious significance, this is due to a calendar problem. Indeed, this difference exists for practical reasons and due to a time lag between two calendars: the Julian calendar and the Gregorian calendar.

At the origin, the first calendar officially used by Christians was the Julian Calendar, which was introduced in Ancient Rome by Julius Caesar in 46 before J.C. In 325 after J.C the Council of Nicaea took place, where for the first time a date was agreed for celebrating Easter and Christmas in the Roman Empire, which had by then converted to Christianity. It was therefore decided to use the Julian calendar, already in use in the Roman Empire, to set the dates of religious festivals. But the Julian calendar, which has been created by the Egyptian astronomer Sosigene, is in fact 11 minutes behind the solar year (the exact time it takes for the Earth to go around the Sun). This has the consequence of shifting a little bit more every year to the date of Christmas.

It’s in 1582, many centuries after the Council of Nicea, when the dates of religious festivals were now completely out of sync, that Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar. This calendar is more aligned with the solar calendar and Christmas has been fixed on the 24th of December, and this date has remained unchanged to the present day. But the Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholic Christians had already made their Schism (great separation of a religion in different cults) in 1054, and the Orthodox Christians didn’t recognize the Pope’s authority, so they refused to adopt the new calendar.

Years later, in 1923, in the face of the ongoing gradual shift of Julian calendar, certain Orthodox Churches (like the Orthodox Church of Greece or Romania) adopted a new version of Julian calendar where dates correspond to Gregorian calendar’s dates: the Milanković calendar. But some other Orthodox churches have preferred to keep the traditional calendar to this day. So, they will celebrate Christmas on the 7th of January 2100, then the 8th of January after 2100.

So it’s for practical reasons, but also for religious and political ones, that there are two different dates for Christmas today. This is a quick summary of the reasons, but history is obviously always much more complex.

To conclude, I think it can be said that if two dates exist for celebrating Christmas, there are a lot of different ways to celebrate it, and it’s especially the Christmas spirit which reunites all those who celebrate it. We also can see things like this: Christmas is two weeks long (from the 24th of December to the 7th of January), and it’s better again! Because this is the diversity of practices and traditions that makes this festival so rich.

Augustin Magaud

Sources :

Noël se fête aussi en janvier, voici pourquoi – nationalgeographic.fr

Jul 16, 1054 CE: Great Schism – education.nationalgeographic.org

Eastern Orthodox Church – http://www.bbc.co.uk

Nouvel An orthodoxe – fr.wikipedia.org

Pourquoi des dates différentes pour célébrer Noël ? – dioceseparis.fr

Pourquoi les orthodoxes fêtent-ils Noël le 7 janvier? – http://www.lejdd.fr