Christmas and holiday season
Christmas period with related and unrelated holidays between the end of November until the first days of January
The Christmas season or the festive season, also known as the holiday season or the holidays, is an annual period generally spanning from November or December to early January incorporating Christmas Day and New Year's Day. The gift-giving associated with the season creates a peak season for the retail sector extending to the end of the period ("January sales"). Christmas window displays and Christmas tree lighting ceremonies are customary traditions in various locales.
In Western Christianity, the Christmas season is traditionally synonymous with Christmastide, which runs from December 25 (Christmas Day) to January 5 (Twelfth Night or Epiphany Eve), popularly known as the 12 Days of Christmas. Christmas in Italy is one of the country's major holidays and begins on 8 December, with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the day on which traditionally the Christmas tree is mounted and ends on 5 January with Twelfth Night (with the following day commencing Epiphanytide). Christmas is celebrated on December 25 Christmas Day, while the Christmas season extends beyond the holiday itself, commonly continuing through New Year’s Day and concluding on January 6 with the celebration of Epiphany. As the economic impact involving the anticipatory lead-up to Christmas Day grew in America and Europe into the 19th and 20th centuries, the term "Christmas season" began to also encompass the liturgical Advent season, the period of preparation observed in Western Christianity from the fourth Sunday before Christmas Day until the night of Christmas Eve. The term "Advent calendar" continues to be widely known in Western parlance as a term referring to a countdown to Christmas Day from the beginning of December.
Beginning in the mid-20th century, as the Christian-associated Christmas holiday and liturgical season, in some circles, became increasingly commercialized and central to American economics and culture while religio-multicultural sensitivity rose, generic references to the season that omitted the word "Christmas" became more common in the corporate and public sphere of the United States, which has caused a semantics controversy. By the late 20th century, the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah and the new African American cultural holiday of Kwanzaa began to be considered in the U.S. as being part of the "holiday season", a term that as of 2013 had become equally or more prevalent than "Christmas season" in U.S. sources to refer to the end-of-the-year festive period.
“Christmas and holiday season” enters the record as christmas period with related and unrelated holidays between the end of November until the first days of January. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Christmas, holiday and season can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Christmas and holiday season” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Christmas, holiday and season provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3517772. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2013.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Christmas and holiday season” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.