Comment by NooneAtAll3
Comment by NooneAtAll3 2 days ago
what's the deal with 12-days advent calendars lately?
Comment by NooneAtAll3 2 days ago
what's the deal with 12-days advent calendars lately?
Advent of Code went from 25 days to 12 days starting this year, as it took too much time each year to come up with 25 unique challenges [1].
No, Advent is the liturgical season preceding Christmas, beginning the fourth Sunday before Christmas (which is also the Sunday nearest November 30), it is a period of at least three weeks and one day (the shortest period that can start on a Sunday and include four Sundays.)
The 12 days of Christmas start on Christmas and end on January 5, the eve of the Feast of Epiphany.
12-day advent calendars are a fairly recent invention that mirrors the 12-days of Christmas, but has no direct correspondence to anything in any traditional Christian religious calendar (the more common 24-day format is also a modern, but less recent, invention detached from the religious calendar, that simplifies by ignoring the floating start date of advent and always starting on Dec. 1.)
True, I should have specified that the timing I was providing was the Western tradition; the Orthodox (both Eastern and Oriental, I believe) tradition has a 40-day Nativity Fast (in some, the name is different in others) mirroring the 40-day season of Lent, that is similar (in terms of being a preparatory season for the Feast of the Nativity) to the Western Advent.
Yes, Christmas is the first of the twelve days of Christmas.
Advent begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, which was Nov 30 this year. It ends on Dec 24. Therefore it is technically anywhere from 22 to 28 days long.
Advent calendars begin on Dec 1 and end on Dec 25.
Advent calendars track time until Christmas. “12 days of Christmas” are the twelve days after Christmas.
Time pressures during christmas/holidays mean that the original calendars were becoming too stressful to handle. Seen several calendars switching to 12 consecutive days or 1 every 2 days challenges.