Today it's Christmas for Orthodox. But why do they celebrate on 7th January?
The reason for this is that they determine what day Christmas should occur on an alternate calendar known as the Julian calendar.
The dispute about when to formally celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ has its roots in AD 325, when a gathering of Christian bishops convened to determine a common date for Easter, the church's most significant celebration.
In order to accomplish this, they chose to use the Julian calendar, which was instituted in 46 BC by the Roman emperor Julius Caesar and bases a year on the length of time the Sun takes to circle the Earth.
The computations, however, overstated the solar year's duration by roughly eleven minutes. As a result, as the centuries passed, there was a growing discrepancy between the solar year and the calendar.
As astronomy became more precise, Pope Gregory devised the Gregorian Calendar in 1582 to correct some of the errors in the Julian Calendar.
It was embraced by most of the Christian world, and in 1752 Great Britain switched to the Gregorian calendar.
But, a small group of believers—known as Orthodox Christians—knew that this was incorrect and continued to use the Julian Calendar.
When the two calendars diverged by 13 days in 1923, Orthodox Christmas fell on January 7, 13 days after December 25.
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