On 7 January, many Orthodox Christians will be greeting one another with “Christ is born!” for the first time this season. For much of the world, Christmas has already come and gone; decorations are coming down, the music has mercifully changed its tune, and ordinary life has resumed its brisk pace. Yet the Church is not obliged to keep time with the marketplace. For some Local Churches, keeping the Nativity “late” is not a stubborn refusal to correct a mistake, but a choice to remain within an inherited rhythm — an established way of sanctifying time.
This is where the conversation about “Old” and “New” calendars often goes astray. It becomes a duel between a broken clock and a repaired one: the Julian calendar is “wrong,” the civil calendar is “right,” end of story. But the Church’s calendar is not merely a device for measuring time. It is a liturgical map — an icon, in its own way — marking the memory of the Gospel and the steady pattern of fasting and feasting by which the Christian life is shaped towards God.
Many of our readers follow the New Calendar; some are Catholics and Protestants who are simply curious why Orthodox Christians sometimes seem to live a fortnight “behind.” So let us look at this calmly, without slogans, and without turning a pastoral choice into a test of loyalty.
When people say “the New Calendar,” they may mean different things.
The Julian calendar (often called the Old Calendar) is the ancient system used throughout the Christian world for centuries. Some Orthodox Churches still use it for fixed feasts such as Christmas (December 25), which currently falls on January 7 on the civil calendar.
The Gregorian calendar is the civil calendar used in most countries today. It was introduced in 1582 in the West to correct a growing mismatch between the calendar and the seasons.
The Revised Julian calendar (sometimes called the New Julian calendar, and often simply “the New Calendar” in Orthodox settings) was adopted by a number of Orthodox Churches in the twentieth century. For fixed feasts it coincides with the civil Gregorian dates for a long period, which is why Christmas is celebrated on December 25 in those Churches. Yet most of these same Churches still calculate Pascha using the traditional Orthodox Paschalion, so that the Orthodox world may celebrate the Feast of Feasts together.
The real picture, then, is not “Orthodox versus the world,” but a family of Churches making different pastoral choices about fixed feasts, while largely keeping a common anchor for Pascha.
The scientific issue behind the divergence is straightforward: the solar year is not exactly 365¼ days long.
The Julian calendar assumes a year length of 365.25 days by adding a leap day every four years, without exception. It is an elegantly simple rule, and its simplicity gives it remarkable stability. But the tropical year — the cycle that governs the seasons — is slightly shorter than this. The difference is about eleven minutes a year. Over long stretches of time, those minutes accumulate. Roughly speaking, the Julian calendar drifts by about one day every 128 years.
This is why the difference between “December 25” on the Julian calendar and “December 25” on the Gregorian calendar is not a matter of opinion. It is a cumulative gap produced by different ways of accounting for leap years.
No seconds are moving faster in one calendar than in another. A day remains a day. The difference lies entirely in how often an extra day is added.
The Julian calendar adds a leap day every four years, always.
The Gregorian calendar also adds a leap day every four years — except that it usually does not add one in century years. One further exception is made: if the century year is divisible by 400, the leap day is kept. That is why 1900 was not a leap year in the Gregorian calendar, while 2000 was.
These skipped leap days are what allow the Gregorian calendar to keep closer to the seasons. They are also why the gap between the two calendars widened over time: it was ten days at the time of the Gregorian reform, it is thirteen days in our present era, and it will become fourteen days after 2100.
The Julian calendar was introduced under Julius Caesar in 46 BC as a stabilising reform. It brought order to a chaotic Roman year and became one of the quiet foundations of European life.
The Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1582 under Pope Gregory XIII. Its aim was not novelty, but correction: over centuries, the spring equinox had drifted away from the date used in ecclesiastical calculations. Catholic countries adopted the reform quickly. Protestant countries were slower, often reluctant to accept a change associated with Rome. Orthodox lands were generally slower still, and not only out of conservatism. Over time, the calendar became entangled with questions of identity, confession, and trust.
In the early twentieth century, another proposal entered the Orthodox world: the Revised Julian calendar. It aimed at astronomical accuracy comparable to the Gregorian calendar while preserving the Orthodox manner of calculating Pascha. In 1923, discussions in Constantinople recommended this approach, and several Orthodox Churches adopted it for fixed feasts.
If the calendar were merely a technical instrument, such changes would be simple. But calendars are lived, not merely calculated.
In 1918, the Russian state adopted the Gregorian calendar. Church life suddenly existed alongside a civil system that had jumped forward by thirteen days. A few years later, amid the turbulence of the early 1920s, Patriarch Tikhon did attempt a calendar reform. Yet the reception was deeply troubled. Many believers experienced the change not as a calm adjustment, but as one more shock in a time of persecution — especially as “reforms” were being pressed upon the Church by movements eager to remodel her life from without.
Seeing the danger of a new and devastating schism, the reform was suspended. Whatever one’s view of the calendar question in principle, the pastoral instinct here is worth noticing: the Church will sometimes endure inconvenience — even ridicule — to avoid tearing the fabric of her people.
At this point the calendar ceases to be an argument about astronomy and becomes an argument about worship.
The Orthodox year rests on the interaction of two cycles.
The fixed cycle is set out in the Menaion: feasts that fall on the same calendar date each year—Christmas (December 25), Theophany (January 6), and the commemorations of saints.
The Paschal cycle is set out in the Triodion and the Pentecostarion: the moving feasts that depend on the date of Pascha — Ascension, Pentecost, and the whole season of preparation and joy that surrounds them.
In the traditional Julian usage, these cycles are not two unrelated wheels. They are meant to mesh in a stable way. When a Church adopts a mixed approach — fixed feasts on the Revised Julian calendar, Pascha on the traditional Paschalion — the gears can still turn, but certain tensions appear.
The most familiar example is the Apostles’ Fast, also known as the Fast of Saints Peter and Paul.
This fast begins after Pentecost, a moving date, and ends on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, a fixed date: June 29. In years when Pascha is late, the distance between Pentecost and June 29 naturally shrinks. Under the Old Calendar rhythm, the fast remains present, though it may be shorter.
Under a mixed system — where Pascha remains tied to the traditional Paschal cycle, while June 29 is celebrated thirteen days “earlier” relative to that cycle — the gap can shrink dramatically. In some years, the fast becomes very short; in certain edge cases, it can effectively disappear.
This need not be used as a reproach. New-Calendar Churches are not careless, and many address this pastoral reality thoughtfully. Yet it helps explain why, for some, the calendar question is not a matter of taste. A calendar does not only place feasts; it shapes fasting. And fasting, in Orthodoxy, is not an optional accessory. It is part of how the Gospel is worked into daily life.
Despite differences in fixed feasts, the Orthodox world has largely preserved unity in Pascha. This is not merely sentimental. It is theological.
The Church’s Paschal discipline reflects a desire to keep the Gospel’s order intact: Passover as the Old Testament type, and Pascha as the fulfilment; the Cross and Resurrection as the climax that does not float free from what is prepared for it. In the canonical tradition, this concern appears in various forms, including the seventh Apostolic Canon, which forbids celebrating Pascha “with the Jews.” Interpretations of this language have varied, but the underlying instinct is not a taste for controversy. It is the insistence that Pascha is not an abstract spring festival, but the fulfilment of the Passover mystery in Christ, and that this sequence should not be liturgically inverted.
This is one reason Orthodox Christians have been cautious about adopting the civil Western calculation of Easter wholesale. Another is unity: if Pascha were calculated differently everywhere, the one feast that most visibly gathers the Orthodox world into a single celebration would fragment into local schedules.
After the upheavals of the early twentieth century, Orthodox leaders sought ways to preserve unity without pretending that one calendar solution would fit every local situation.
In 1948, a pan-Orthodox meeting in Moscow addressed the calendar question among other matters. Its wider historical setting is complex, but one principle expressed there remains clear: local Churches might differ in their approach to the fixed calendar, yet the common celebration of Pascha should be preserved.
In other words, different Christmas dates may exist in practice, but the Empty Tomb should not become a local custom.
Here a private line from Dostoevsky captures the tension with unsettling clarity. In a letter, he once wrote that even if someone proved to him that Christ were “outside the truth,” he would choose Christ.
Taken literally, such a statement would be absurd for a Christian — Christ is not outside the Truth; He is the Truth. Dostoevsky is not offering a dogmatic formula. He is describing a spiritual reflex: when “truth” is reduced to proofs, systems, and cold arithmetic — when it becomes something we possess rather than Someone we love — the Christian clings to Christ.
Seen in this light, the calendar question is not a rejection of science. It is a question of priority. The calendar is not only an astronomical instrument; it is also a liturgical inheritance.
Here the calendar begins to appear not as a neutral tool, but as an “Icon of Time.” An icon is not a photograph. It does not aim to reproduce the world with scientific realism, but to reveal it as ordered towards communion with God. What appears as “inaccuracy” is often a deliberate stylisation, chosen for the sake of contemplation.
In a similar way, the Julian calendar can be seen, in the Old-Calendar conscience, not as a failed instrument, but as a received liturgical icon: an inherited pattern that has carried the prayers of generations. To change it may be possible. The question is whether such a change is merely a technical improvement, or a rupture in a living rhythm already sanctified by long use.
Fairness requires saying the other side plainly. Those who keep the New Calendar are not betraying Tradition. Many adopted it for pastoral reasons: to reduce confusion in societies where Christian feasts are public holidays; to help families live and worship without constant collision with school and work; to simplify missionary witness. These concerns are not trivial.
The point is not to award medals for stubbornness or modernity. It is to understand why, for the Russian Orthodox Church and other Old-Calendar Churches, remaining with the Julian rhythm has felt like fidelity — not to an equation, but to a received way of praying.
One unexpected fruit of the difference is the “buffer” it creates.
When Christmas falls on December 25 in the civil world, it often arrives in a blaze of noise and then vanishes overnight. By December 26, the world is already packing the feast away. The Nativity is treated as a seasonal climax, not as an entrance into mystery.
When the Nativity is celebrated on January 7, the world’s noise has usually faded. The parties are over. The shops have moved on. And the Church stands, almost alone, singing about the Child in the manger and the unthinkable humility of God.
This is not a claim of superiority. It is simply a different atmosphere — one that can feel like mercy. It gives the feast room to breathe. It allows the Church to refuse to be hurried.
Whether one keeps Christmas on December 25 or January 7, the heart of the feast is the same: the Word became flesh, for our salvation. Calendars are tools, and they matter because they shape common life — fasting, feasting, and prayer. But the Nativity is not a date on a wall. It is the coming of Christ.
And if the Church sometimes chooses a rhythm that seems “late” to the world, perhaps it is because she is learning — slowly and faithfully — to keep time with Him.
