First Sunday of Advent
29 November 2026 · movable holiday — The first candle is lit – the light begins its way to Christmas.
The First Sunday of Advent is the first of the four Sundays before Christmas and marks the beginning of the church year in Western Christianity. The word Advent comes from the Latin adventus, meaning arrival or coming. It is a season of quiet waiting and preparation. The date is movable: it falls on the Sunday between 27 November and 3 December, and in 2026 it is 29 November. In Germany the season is symbolised by the Advent wreath with four candles, one more lit each Sunday. According to tradition, the first version was made in Hamburg in 1839 by Johann Hinrich Wichern for the children in his shelter, the Rauhes Haus. It was a large wooden wheel with about two dozen candles: small ones for each day and four large ones for the Sundays. Today’s four-candle wreath is a later simplification. Today many German towns open their Christmas markets around this day. In the sky, these are the long nights: the days keep shortening until the winter solstice around 21 December, and the candles remind us that the light will return.
Flying across the sky: An ethereal, bluish-silver wreath made of luminous dots and fine lines, like a constellation drifting across the night sky
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