What Is the Liturgical Year? A Guide to the Church Calendar

The liturgical year is a calendar that does not begin on January 1 and does not repeat identically. It begins on the first Sunday of Advent, four Sundays before Christmas, and runs through to the Sunday before Advent begins again. Because it is anchored to Easter, which moves, most of its dates land on a different day each year.

The Two Anchors

Half the year is fixed and half is movable. Christmas on December 25 and Epiphany on January 6 are fixed: they fall on the same date annually and drift only in which weekday they land on. Easter is movable, calculated from the spring equinox and the moon, and it drags a long chain of dates with it -- Ash Wednesday 46 days before, Palm Sunday the week before, Ascension 39 days after, Pentecost 49 days after.

Work out Easter and you have worked out most of the year. That is exactly what our liturgical calendar generator does: pick a year and a tradition and it lays out the seasons with their start and end dates, the principal feast days, and the color assigned to each season.

The Seasons in Order

The western year runs Advent, Christmas, Epiphany and Ordinary Time, Lent, Easter, then the long stretch of Ordinary Time after Pentecost. Advent and Lent are penitential and wear purple; Christmas and Easter are festal and wear white; Ordinary Time wears green. The colors are not decoration, they are the fastest signal in the building of where in the year you are.

The Orthodox year has the same shape but different landmarks: the Nativity Fast, Great Lent beginning at Clean Monday, Pascha, the Apostles' Fast, and the Dormition Fast in August. Pascha is calculated on the Julian reckoning, so in most years it falls later than western Easter -- sometimes by a month, occasionally on the same day.

A Note on Orthodox Dates

The generator lists Orthodox fixed feasts on the Revised Julian calendar, which agrees with the civil date and covers most jurisdictions. Old Calendar churches keep those same fixed feasts thirteen days later, so Nativity falls on January 7 by the civil calendar. Pascha is Julian for everyone; only the fixed feasts differ.

Keeping It Alongside the Civil Year

Most people need both calendars at once. Generate the church year, then mark its dates onto a yearly calendar to see how the seasons sit against the working year, or onto a monthly calendar for the months where the two collide hardest -- which is usually December and whichever month holds Holy Week.