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<\/p>\nToday is January 7th and it’s Christmas day here in Ukraine. I’ve received a few questions about why Ukraine doesn’t celebrate Christmas on December 25th, so here’s an explanation for you.<\/p>\n
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Religious holidays in Ukraine are determined by the Orthodox Church, which follows the Julian calendar<\/a>, introduced by Julius Cesar in 45 BC. \u00a0However, most of the rest of the world follows the Gregorian calendar, which was introduced in 1582 to correct the Julian calendar.<\/p>\n What\u2019s the difference?<\/p>\n The main difference between the two calendars is how leap years are calculated. The Gregorian calendar<\/a> does not add a leap day to most years that our\u00a0divisible\u00a0by 100. Thus the years 1800 and 1900 were not leap years although they are divisible by 4.<\/p>\n The result is that the Gregorian calendar is ten minutes and 48 seconds per year shorter than the Julian calendar. That means that every 133 years the Julian calendar falls behind by a day.<\/p>\n Currently the old Julian calendar is thirteen days behind the newer Gregorian calendar, thus Christmas comes on January 7th, exactly 13 days after December 25.<\/p>\n Now that we have the dates figured out I want to share with you how we celebrated Christmas here.<\/p>\n Our church had two services, one on Christmas Eve and one on Christmas day.<\/p>\n For our Christmas Eve service we had our children participate. They did an amazing job, just check out a few of the videos below. I also had the privilege of preaching on Christmas Eve.<\/p>\n You can watch my sermon here in Russian.<\/a><\/p>\n And you can see some of the children’s performances below!How We Celebrated Christmas<\/h2>\n
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