Pastoral and Practical Guidance
How to read Old Style and New Style dates, how to convert them, and how to handle the questions the calendar difference actually raises — the two Christmases, the fast through the Western holidays, travelling to a New Calendar parish, mixed families, and what a convert should and should not be taught about all this.
Tradition: Russian Orthodox / ROCOR (with pan-Orthodox notes)
Reading the Dates
OS is Old Style, the Julian calendar. NS is New Style, the civil (Gregorian) calendar. A Julian-calendar church’s service book gives Julian dates; the civil world gives Gregorian ones; parish calendars usually print both.
The conversion rule, at present: add thirteen days. This holds from 1 March 1900 to 28 February 2100, after which it becomes fourteen days.
| Feast | Julian (OS) | Civil (NS), 1900–2100 |
|---|---|---|
| Church New Year (Indiction) | 1 September | 14 September |
| Nativity of the Theotokos | 8 September | 21 September |
| Exaltation of the Cross | 14 September | 27 September |
| Entrance of the Theotokos | 21 November | 4 December |
| Nativity of Christ | 25 December | 7 January |
| Circumcision / St Basil | 1 January | 14 January |
| Theophany | 6 January | 19 January |
| Meeting of the Lord | 2 February | 15 February |
| Annunciation | 25 March | 7 April |
| Ss Peter and Paul | 29 June | 12 July |
| Transfiguration | 6 August | 19 August |
| Dormition | 15 August | 28 August |
Pascha and the movable cycle are given directly in civil dates and require no conversion. This trips people up constantly: a Julian-calendar parish calendar will list the Nativity on 25 December and Pascha on, say, 12 April — the first a Julian date, the second a civil one. There is no inconsistency; the two cycles are reckoned differently (see The Drift and What It Does and Does Not Affect).
And a correction worth carrying: Orthodox Pascha is not thirteen days after Western Easter. It is later by nothing, one week, four weeks, or five. In 2025 the two fell on the same day.
Which Calendar Should I Keep?
The one your parish keeps. The calendar is a matter of the order of a church, settled by its synod and applied by its bishop and priest. It is not a matter of individual preference, and it is not a devotional option to be adopted privately.
This has a practical edge. A person in a New Calendar parish who decides to keep the Julian calendar on his own — fasting when the parish feasts, feasting when the parish fasts — has not become stricter; he has separated his own observance from the assembly’s, which is the opposite of what a liturgical calendar is for. If the question genuinely troubles him he should raise it with his priest, and if he wishes to worship on the old calendar he should attend a parish that keeps it.
The same applies in reverse. A member of a Julian-calendar parish does not keep Nativity on 25 December civil because his neighbours do.
Attending a Parish on the Other Calendar
Entirely permissible, and no explanation is required. If you travel and the only Orthodox parish within reach keeps the other calendar, go, pray, and — with the ordinary preparation and, where required, the ordinary blessing of the priest — receive Communion. You are not compromising anything, because the calendar is not a boundary of the Church (see Why the Calendar Is Not a Dogma).
If your only local parish is on the other calendar, that is where you belong. A Christian who stays away from the Liturgy over a calendar has got the priorities exactly backwards.
The Two Christmases
For an Orthodox family on the Julian calendar in a Western country, 25 December civil is an ordinary day of the Nativity Fast, and the feast falls on 7 January.
Some practical counsel, offered as counsel and not as rule:
Keep the feast liturgically where the Church keeps it. The Nativity is 25 December OS. Attend the Vigil and the Liturgy. That is the feast.
A family gathering on 25 December civil is a family gathering. If relatives, in-laws, or a spouse’s family observe the civil date, attending a family dinner is an act of love, not a liturgical statement. What is eaten there is a matter for the ordinary economy of the fast, settled with one’s priest (see Orthodoxy: Fasting Rules; Orthodoxy: Pastoral Economy). The pattern many families settle on — a modest presence at the family occasion, without a display either of abstinence or of indifference — is neither hypocrisy nor laxity.
Do not make the fast a performance. “When ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance… anoint thine head, and wash thy face; that thou appear not unto men to fast” (Matthew 6:16–18). A person at an office party in December who narrates his fast to the table has already lost more than he is keeping.
Set the measure in advance, with your priest. The Nativity Fast through the Western holiday season is the hardest stretch of the year for Orthodox Christians in the West, and it is much easier to keep a measure agreed beforehand than to improvise one under pressure at a table (see Orthodoxy: Fasting Periods, which notes the difficulty in the same terms).
Children. The double season is often experienced by children as a straightforward gain — a season of preparation while everyone else is celebrating, and then a feast of their own. Where it is experienced as deprivation, the remedy is to make the Church’s feast genuinely festive at home, not to argue about calendars with a seven-year-old.
Mixed Families and Mixed Marriages
Where husband and wife, or parents and adult children, belong to jurisdictions on different calendars, the ordinary counsel is that the household follows the calendar of the parish where the family actually worships, and that the other date is kept as a family observance without liturgical claims. Where the two spouses attend different parishes, the question should be taken to the priests involved rather than settled by argument at home. Nothing in the tradition requires a family to be divided by this, and a great deal in it counsels against making a matter of order into a matter of conscience.
Namedays, Baptisms, Weddings
Namedays are kept on the day the parish keeps the saint. Converts often have a saint’s day that falls on different civil dates in different jurisdictions; this is not a problem to be solved, only a fact to be known.
Weddings are not celebrated during the fasting seasons or on the eves of fast days, and the fasting seasons differ by thirteen days between calendars for the Nativity and Dormition fasts. A couple planning a wedding across jurisdictions should check both calendars early.
Baptisms and funerals are not restricted by the calendar question in any way.
What a Convert Should Be Taught
Teach: the Symbol of Faith; the Mysteries; confession and Communion; the fasts and the feasts of the parish he is joining; how to read the parish calendar; that Pascha is common to all Orthodox.
Also teach, once and calmly: that his church keeps the Julian calendar, why it does (see The Case for the Old Calendar), and that other Orthodox churches keep another calendar and are entirely Orthodox.
Do not teach, because these are false and this collection has documented why:
- that the First Ecumenical Council prescribed the Julian calendar (see Nicaea and the Independence of the Christian Reckoning);
- that a synod of 1583 anathematized all who follow the new calendar, on the authority of the Sigillion (see What the Julian Calendar Is);
- that New Calendar churches are graceless, fallen, or outside the Church (see Why the Calendar Is Not a Dogma);
- that Orthodox Pascha differs from Western Easter by thirteen days.
A convert taught these four things will have to unlearn them, and in the meantime will have been given a false measure of the Church. The old-calendar position does not need them and is stronger without them.
Two Cautions, One in Each Direction
Against using the calendar as a test. It is not one. Enquiring which calendar another Orthodox Christian keeps in order to place him is a misuse of the question, and a person who finds himself doing it should notice what has happened. The Church built a fast-free week into her own year specifically to prevent ascetic observance from becoming an identity (see The Fasting Seasons and Their Logic); the same instinct applies here.
And against treating it as nothing. The old calendar is kept for reasons, the reasons are good, and a person in a Julian-calendar parish should know them rather than experiencing the practice as an ethnic survival he tolerates. Keeping something well requires understanding why it is kept.
See Also
- The Current Map — who keeps what, as of August 2026
- The Case for the Old Calendar — the reasons behind this library’s practice
- Why the Calendar Is Not a Dogma — the limits every counsel here assumes
- Orthodoxy: Calendar and Typikon in ROCOR — this library’s jurisdiction and its practice
- Orthodoxy: Fasting Periods — the seasons and their pastoral difficulties
- Orthodoxy: Pastoral Economy — how economy is properly exercised
References
- On the Participation of the Faithful in the Eucharist. Document of the Hierarchal Consultation of the Russian Orthodox Church. Moscow, 2–3 February 2015.
- Rose, Hieromonk Seraphim. “The Rule of Fasting in the Orthodox Church.” The Orthodox Word; widely reprinted.
- Bulgakov, Sergei V. Nastolnaya Kniga [Handbook for Church Servers]. 2nd ed., 1900.
- Hapgood, Isabel Florence. Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church. Various editions.
- Ware, Timothy (Kallistos). The Orthodox Church. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1993.