Days until Christmas — and every other holiday

How the countdown works

The Christmas clock at the top counts down to midnight at the start of 25 December in the timezone you select, and it recomputes from your device clock on every tick, so it stays exact even after the tab has been in the background for hours. Underneath, every tracked holiday is listed with the number of whole calendar days remaining, counted from today where you are.

Nothing on this page is a stored lookup table. Every date is derived from the rule that defines the holiday at the moment the page loads, which is why the list rolls over on its own the day after each one passes, and why the six-year table can be generated for any span.

Fixed-date holidays

These fall on the same calendar date every year, though the weekday moves. Because the Gregorian year is 365.2425 days long, a fixed date advances by one weekday each year and by two across a leap year.

Holidays defined by a weekday rule

These move within a fixed window each year. The rule, not the date, is what is stored.

Easter and the computus

Easter is the hardest date in the western calendar to compute. The rule agreed at the Council of Nicaea in 325 puts Easter Sunday on the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon that falls on or after 21 March. The word "ecclesiastical" is doing a lot of work: the church uses a tabular approximation of the lunar cycle rather than the real moon, so Easter can differ from the astronomical answer by a week.

This page uses the anonymous Gregorian algorithm — usually credited to Meeus, Jones and Butcher — which produces the date arithmetically for any Gregorian year. Easter therefore falls between 22 March and 25 April, a 35-day window, and it drags Good Friday, Ash Wednesday, Ascension and Pentecost with it. Eastern Orthodox churches compute the same rule against the Julian calendar, so their Easter usually lands on a different Sunday.

Why the day count can differ by one

"Days until" is a calendar-day count, not a division of elapsed hours. If it is 23:00 on 20 December where you are, Christmas is 5 days away — even though only about 4 days and 1 hour of real time remain. That is the answer people actually mean, and it is why the reference timezone matters near midnight: it is already tomorrow in Auckland while it is still today in Los Angeles.

Planning ahead

• Shipping deadlines — most carriers publish last-posting dates in the first half of December; count back roughly 10 to 14 days from the 25th for international post.
• Black Friday — because it is tied to Thanksgiving it can land as early as 23 November or as late as the 29th, which shifts the whole retail calendar year to year.
• Bank holidays that fall at a weekend — in the UK a substitute weekday is granted; in the US, federal holidays on a Saturday are observed the Friday before and on a Sunday the Monday after. Those substitute days are not listed here.
• Working days, not calendar days — if you need the number of working days before a holiday, the business days calculator handles weekends and your own holiday list.