The church year
The church changes colour six times a year, and so does this website. The ring below is the year with today marked on it.
Everything on this page is worked out from the date rather than typed in, which is why it will still be right long after whoever built the site has moved on.
The ring is the year. Today is marked on it. Each arc is a season and each is the colour the church actually is during it — the same colour as the panel at the top of the front page, because both read the same calendar.
Easter moves, so everything hanging off it moves too: Ash Wednesday is forty-six days before Easter, Pentecost is forty-nine days after. This site works all of that out rather than being told, which is why it will still be right in 2041.
The eight seasons
What each one is, and what it is like to walk into.
Advent · violet
Four Sundays before Christmas. Kept quietly. No carols until the carol service, and the church is deliberately plainer than it will be in a fortnight.
Christmas · gold
25 December to 5 January. Twelve days, not one. The crib stays up until Candlemas, whatever the supermarkets have moved on to.
Epiphany · green
6 January to Shrove Tuesday. The long ordinary weeks of deep winter, and the quietest and best time to come if you are nervous.
Lent · violet
Ash Wednesday to Palm Sunday. Forty days. The flowers go, the organ is used sparingly, and on this website the photographs are veiled.
Holy Week · red
Palm Sunday to Holy Saturday. The most demanding week of the year and the one worth coming to if you come to nothing else.
Easter · gold
Easter Day for fifty days. It starts in the dark on Saturday night with a fire in the churchyard, and it does not stop for seven weeks.
Pentecost · red
Fifty days after Easter. Red, and the one Sunday of the year the congregation is asked to wear it too. Most forget.
Ordinary Time · green
Pentecost to Advent. Half the year, in green. Not a gap between the interesting parts — the part where most of it actually happens.
Two English variants we did not decide for you
Some parishes keep Sarum blue in Advent rather than violet, and some use the unbleached Lenten array instead of purple. Both are legitimate English use and neither is more correct.
They are settings in church.config.json, not decisions baked into this template — set adventUse to sarum or lentUse to array and the whole site follows, including the panel at the top of the front page.