Public holidays · 2025
Orthodox Christmas Day falls on Tuesday, January 7, 2025 in Belarus in 2025.
A public holiday across Belarus: most employees have the day off.
In 2025 it falls on a Tuesday, a working day.
Fixed date: it is on the same day of the year every year (Jan 7).
Saturday and Sunday · A public holiday does not always close every business. Essential services, shops and some industries keep working, and pay rules differ by country and contract.
Orthodox Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus in the Orthodox churches that still use the Julian calendar for fixed feasts, among them the Russian, Serbian, Georgian, Macedonian and Jerusalem churches. It is the same festival as Christmas on 25 December in the West, only counted on a different calendar. On this site 7 January is a public holiday in Russia, Belarus, Serbia, North Macedonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Moldova, among others, and a holiday for the Orthodox community in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Egypt and Ethiopia also keep 7 January for Christmas, following the Coptic and Ethiopian calendars. By contrast, the Greek and Romanian Orthodox churches celebrate on 25 December.
In Serbia the celebrations begin on Christmas Eve, 6 January, called Badnji dan. Families bring in an oak branch, the badnjak, and burn it, and on Christmas Day a round loaf called the cesnica, with a coin baked inside, is broken. The greeting is Hristos se rodi, answered with Vaistinu se rodi, meaning Christ is born, truly he is born. Christmas Eve is a fast day, and the Christmas dinner traditionally centres on a roast pig. In Russia, Christmas was largely erased from public life in the Soviet period and became a national holiday again in 1992; New Year remains the bigger winter celebration there.
Everywhere in Belarus.
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Questions
A public holiday across Belarus: most employees have the day off.
Tuesday, January 7, 2025.