Moon calendar for December 2026

Day by day

Key days of the month

The longest night of the year

The solstice lands on the 21st, but the earliest sunset happens a week or so before it - evenings start lengthening while mornings are still getting darker, which is why nobody believes the year has turned. The Geminids on the 13th and 14th are the best shower going, up to a hundred an hour, and they come from an asteroid rather than a comet, which is peculiar and still not fully explained. Orion stands due south at midnight, the three stars of the Belt obvious even from a lit street.

Cold Moon, Long Night Moon

December's names are unusually literal: Cold Moon, and the Long Night Moon for the fifteen hours it can spend above the horizon. Old English calendars called it the Moon Before Yule, tying it to the feast rather than to the thermometer. It is also the highest full moon of the year, the mirror image of June's, so it clears the rooftops early and stays up for the whole of a very long night.

December's questions

Will the full moon fall over Christmas? The key days above answer it, and the coincidence is far rarer than the cards suggest. The rest of the month's post is about hair before the party season and about which phase to begin something on. The calendar answers the first half of that honestly - here is the phase - and declines the second, because a lunar phase has no opinion about your plans and anyone selling you lucky dates is inventing them.

The Moon’s position is astronomy; the beliefs and interpretations are tradition, not scientific fact.