Holiday Countdown

How to use the holiday countdown

1. Open the page: the Holiday menu is set to All holidays (nearest first), and the big counter shows the next holiday coming up.
2. To follow one holiday, pick it in the Holiday menu, or click its name in the table. The counter switches to that holiday and shows the days, hours, minutes and seconds left.
3. Read the table below the counter: each holiday with its Next date, the Days left and the Rule used to compute it.
4. Bookmark or share the page after choosing a holiday: the address ends with a short code such as #christmas, so the same countdown opens next time.

The counter aims at midnight at the start of the holiday, in your own time zone, and updates several times a second. When the day arrives, it says so; the next day, it rolls over to next year’s date automatically.

Which holidays are included

This tool covers the dates people most often count down to in Canada and the United States:

• Christmas (December 25), New Year’s Day (January 1), Halloween (October 31) and Valentine’s Day (February 14);
• Canada Day (July 1), Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day (June 24, Quebec’s Fête nationale) and Remembrance Day (November 11);
• Easter, Thanksgiving (Canada), Thanksgiving (US), Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, whose dates change every year.

Nothing is stored in a yearly list: every date is calculated from its rule, so the countdown works for any year without updates.

How the moving dates are calculated

• Easter is the Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon on or after March 21. The tool uses the Anonymous Gregorian algorithm (Meeus/Jones/Butcher), the standard way of computing Western Easter. It can fall between March 22 and April 25; in 2027 it’s on March 28.
• Thanksgiving (Canada) is the second Monday of October, as set by federal proclamation since 1957.
• Thanksgiving (US) is the fourth Thursday of November, fixed by Congress in 1941.
• Mother’s Day is the second Sunday of May, and Father’s Day the third Sunday of June, in both Canada and the United States.

These are Canadian and US conventions. Many other countries use different days: Mother’s Day falls in March in the United Kingdom (Mothering Sunday) and on the last Sunday of May in France, and Father’s Day is in March in Italy and Spain. Orthodox Easter follows the Julian calendar and is often a week or more later.

How the days are counted

“Days left” is the number of calendar days between today and the holiday, in your time zone. The day before Christmas shows 1 day; Christmas Day itself shows Today. The live counter shows the exact time left until midnight at the start of the holiday, so on the evening of December 23 it reads about 1 day and a few hours. Daylight saving time changes are handled by your device’s clock.

Remember that the date of a holiday is not always the day off. For example, when Canada Day falls on a Sunday, the statutory holiday moves to Monday, July 2. To count working days or statutory holidays by province, use the business days calculator.