For years as a child it was often said that the unofficial end of Christmas in the United States was from Thanksgiving (in the end of November) to New Years Day. Then one day in grade school, a teacher said at one time the end of Christmas was celebrated on the Feast of the Epiphany. (This occurs Jan. 6th, for those of you who don’t know or weren’t sure.) Then several years back I bought a Polish cook book that said in Poland they celebrate Christmas until Candlemas Day, aka Ground Hogs Day, Feb. 2nd. This got me even more confused, but I eventually concluded this was a practice only in Poland. Then a couple of years ago I found out in the U.S. wing of the Catholic church, at least, they celebrate the Christmas season until the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, which usually occurs around the middle of January. This seemed to settle things for me, until this year when I watched the televised version of the Midnight Mass, celebrated in Rome. The narrator said they keep their Christmas decorations up till Candlemas in Rome too!
This is what I want to know: when is the official end of Christmas according to the census in most Christian religions? (I know unoffically Christmas can last anywhere from Dec. 26 to Mar. 21. That is not the information I want .)
I think in Christian religions it’s Epiphany (which is tomorrow and my birthday too, in case anyone forgot to send a card). The rumor is that this is the day the Magi saw Jesus for the first time or something like that. Alternatively it’s the day Jesus was baptised as an adult.
I still wish everyone would take down their lights the day after Christmas, if not the day before!
Lights should stay up (and turned on) until late enough in Spring that sunset occurs after I get home from work. After driving in in the morning gloom then back home in pitch black there’s nothing nicer than to enter the neighborhood & see it all lit up.
Once the sun’s still up at that time then everybody can stow their lights.
Christmas ends on Christmas Day. Drawing the celebration out to some arbitrary date a week or two later has nothing to do with any Church dogma that I’m aware of.
Pagan festivals such as Yule or Saturnalia, OTOH were week long festivals of drinking / debauchery / present giving etc. Maybe we can ask Doper Druids when Christmas ends
I will need to be your Official Source on this, as it is impossible to get the “Christian Religions” to agree on much of anything. (Did you mean the consensus? )In fairness, it’s impossible to get any Religion to agree on much of anything.
Historically, the Christmas season was celebrated from Christmas Eve until Epiphany, as stated above. Though this persists to a degree, it has changed for many reasons. Off the top of my head (and with no authority whatsoever):
Retail culture. With the “highlight” of Christmas being the gift exchange (or even the Christmas mass, for the more religious / less cynical), the rest of the season feels anticlimactic.
1a. The extension of the Christmas Season. If Christmas starts the day after Thanksgiving [not in my world, but that involves a lot of stubborn and willful ignorance], the holiday becomes too long to last much after the 25th.
New Year’s Day. There used to be two New Year’s, on 1/1 and 25 March. January 2, 1650, was a week after December 25, 1650. New Year’s has grown up and moved out of the Christmas household, taking on a separate identity and separate customs. Plus, we’re a bit more number-conscious than we once were, and doing Christmas 2007 in 2008 feels a bit like a stale rerun. Returning to Christmas after New Year’s now feels weird instead of normal.
American at-work ethic. We no longer have the leisure of more time off in winter as did the farming folks of yore, and we don’t feel like paying our employees to sit around celebrating when they could be at work surfing the net. We feel that holidays should be a three-day weekend, or possibly (if it’s really important) a four-day weekend. Who has time for this twelve-day festival crap when there’s widgets to produce?
I would say that in the United States, the Christmas season now begins on the fourth Friday in November, and lasts until the Monday following December 25th. We do not have a boxing day tradition here. Some people mark the end of the season the same way they marked the beginning, rushing out to post-Christmas sales, which gives a nice if shallow symmetry to the whole thing.
From a Puerto Rican point of view, the Christmas season lasts until Día de los Reyes, or Three Kings Day. She’s opening gifts with her family tomorrow (the ones the Three Kings left under the beds), and then pfft! Christmas season is over.
I’m pretty sure that the Catholic Church recognizes the 12 days of Christmas as the days between Christmas and Epiphany- I know that the United Methodist Church does.
However, the secular Christmas is a big retail run-up to 12/25, with barely a notice of Xmas among the wrapping paper and empty boxes…
Any church that keeps a “church calendar” with liturgical seasons (ranging from Copts to Methodists, including Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Orthodox, etc.) considers that “Christmas” means two things: (1) The celebration of the day of Jesus’s Birth, Dec. 25 in the West – shared with the churches who celebrate only a few major feasts, like Christmas and Easter; (2) the twelve-day season starting at sundown Dec. 24 (Christmas Eve) and ending at sundown Jan. 5 (Twelfth Night, Epiphany Eve). The Feast of the Baptism of our Lord is always on the Sunday after Epiphany Day. The four Sundays immediately preceding Christmas Day and the weekdays following them constitute Advent, a time of preparation for (1) the commemoration of Jesus’s First Coming at Bethlehem, (2) a look forward at His Second Coming in glory, according to prophecy, and (3) internal preparation for both of ther above.
Secularly, the tradition was to begin the preparation-for-Christmas season on the Friday following Thanksgiving. When people ended their personal celebration was completely up to them, but most people left decorations up until after New Years Day, many until Epiphany.
The incursion of “the Christmas season” into early November or even before is purely the product of advertising and marketing hype, and the idea that it should end after one day is simply people getting fed up with the marketing/media blitz.
For the record, the Sunday following Christmas is traditionally a time to focus on the theology of the Incarnation, with the first chapter of John’s Gospel the key reading, and the three weekdays following Christmas (Dec. 26, 27, and 28 unless that Sunday falls on one of them, in which case it and any day following gets pushed forward one day) are respectively the commemorations of St. Stephen the First Martyr (the ‘feast of Stephen’ when Good King Wenceslas [St. Wenceslas III, King of Bohemia] looked out), St. John the Divine, and The Holy Innocents (the babies of the Bethlehem area that Herod killed, cf. the Coventry Carol).
I’m not at all religious, but I do subscribe to the twelve days of Christmas thing. I would ideally like to see the Christmas stuff start to ramp up in early to mid December, and carry through to January. The other major religions seem to have festivals like Ramadan that go for many days, but Christmas is a bit strange in that regard - and that’s the creepy bit: there is all this (esp. retail) hype starting in October or earlier, and then on the very day itself, it just stops dead.
I went to the supermarket early in the morning of the 26th. After months of full-on and in-your-face CHRISTMAS, it had just vanished. They probably had the nightshift teenagers stay back to pull down all the decorations. There is something almost Orwellian about that - there is no Christmas, there was no Christmas, and there never will be a Christmas.
Bring on the hot cross buns. That’s where the next dollar is. Prepare the signs for Secretaries’ Day, or whatever is next.
After the hype, we need a Christmas wind-down period, and we are denied that.
I think those of us with school-aged kids in the US get that - it’s called “Winter Break”. Christmas lasts until the kids go back to school, although that can vary from school district to district. Our decorations are coming down today and tomorrow, and The Kid is back at school on Monday morning.
Not a religious answer to the OP, but yet another unofficial, secular one.
I find it difficult not to include Epiphany itself within the concept of “The Christmas Season.” If you want to wax really pedantic, then at least the morning on Epiphany. See here, for example: http://www.cresourcei.org/cyepiph.html "Epiphany is the climax of the Advent/Christmas Season and the Twelve Days of Christmas, which are usually counted from the evening of December 25th until the morning of January 6th, which is the Twelfth Day. In following this older custom of counting the days beginning at sundown, the evening of January 5th is the Twelfth Night…In some church traditions, only the full days are counted so that January 5th is the Eleventh Day of Christmas, January 6th is the Twelfth Day, and the evening of January 6th is counted as the Twelfth Night. "
Even leaving aside arguments over how to count the days of Christmastide, the association (at least in Western church tradition) of the Magi with the Christmas story makes it hard to leave Epiphany itself out of the “Christmas Season” does it not? In any case my lights are staying up until tomorrow. And this is the Official End of my input on this important topic…
Something else to add…In New Orleans, January 6th is the beginning of Carnival Season, which ends on Fat Tuesday–Mardi Gras. It seems that in other places, Carnival may start earlier or later, but I’ve been told that in the early days of Carnival in New Orleans, the citizens were mostly Catholic and didn’t want Carnival to overlap with the Chrismas Season.
Carnival universally ends on Mardi Gras Day and the following day is Ash Wednesday…the beginning of Lent.
for orthodox types christmas day starts at sundown (between vespers and great compline) on the 24th of dec. (jan 6th for jul.) and goes 'till sundown on dec. 25th (jan. 7th for jul.)the christmas season runs until sundown jan. 6th (jan. 18th for jul.). all the music will be related to the nativity until theophany eve.
the sunday before the nativity will have the reading of the “begots”, the sunday after will have the reading of herod’s decree.
In the traditional Latin rite of the Catholic Church the season of Christmas (tempus natalicium) runs from I Vespers of Christmas through until 13 January. It comprises two sub-periods:
(i) Christmastide (tempus Nativitatis), from I Vespers of Christmas until None of 5 January; and
(ii) Epiphany (tempus Epiphaniae), from I Vespers of Epiphany until 13 January.
The season *per annum * commences from 14 January, the feast of Saint Hilary.
In the current Latin (Novus Ordo) rite of the Catholic Church, the Christmas season commences with I Vespers and the Vigil Mass of Christmas on Christmas Eve. The season continues until the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, generally celebrated on the first Sunday after the feast of the Epiphany. “Ordinary” time starts the next day.
Depends on the particular church. As **Cunctator ** has posted, Ephiphany is part of the Christmas season in the Roman Catholic tradition, but it’s not in most Anglican traditions - it’s a separate time.
I thought this sprung out of Epiphany and was sort of the same thing with a slightly different name. Is it completely seperate? Either way, I need to find my copy of Noche De Reyes to watch tomorrow.
Epiphany is what I think of as the end of the Christmas season. I was raised by a Catholic and it’s always been tradition to use that day to un-decorate the tree and pack everything away until next year.
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