Yalda Night

Yalda night at a glance

Persian dates

The evening of 30 Azar, into 1 Dey

Gregorian window

December 20 to December 22

Distinct evening dates

3

Years documented

101

ChinRooz publishes the dates the calendar assigns, not the moment of the solstice or the length of the night.

A night for staying awake together

Yalda night is the year's long sitting. It begins in the evening that closes the last day of Azar and runs until morning, and the sitting itself is the observance. Families gather, often in the home of the oldest member of the household, and no one is expected to leave early.

A table is laid and left out for hours. Pomegranate and watermelon are the fruits most associated with the night, their red flesh set against the dark of winter. Dried fruit and nuts are passed around, tea keeps coming, and nothing about the eating is hurried.

Poetry is read aloud. Hafez is the usual choice, and in many households someone opens the Divan at a page chosen at random and reads out the lines found there — فال حافظ, a custom kept in company and with some ceremony. In other families the Shahnameh is read instead, or as well. Stories, riddles and long conversation fill the rest of the hours.

The night belongs to no single country. It is kept across a broad region by communities of many languages and ancestries, as shared inheritance rather than as any one group's property. What varies is the detail — which fruit, which book, whose house. What holds everywhere is the shape: a long night, a full table, and people staying up through it.

The hinge between Azar and Dey

Yalda sits exactly on the join between the ninth Persian month and the tenth. It ends Azar and opens Dey — the last dark of autumn and the first dark of winter, in one sitting. That is why it is counted as a boundary rather than as a day of its own.

Its other name is شب چلّه, the night of the chelleh. Chelleh names a span of forty, and the great chelleh is the forty nights of deep winter that begin as Dey begins. The night that opens the count gives the count its name and takes the name back in return.

The tradition holds this to be the longest night of the year, the turn after which the dark starts to give ground. That reckoning belongs to the northern half of the world; on the same dates the southern half stands at the height of its summer. What the night marks, in the tradition that keeps it, is the pivot — the point from which the light comes back.

Why the date moves, and why there are two of them

The lengths of the Persian months are set by the calendar's own rule: the first six run thirty-one days, the next five run thirty, and Esfand runs twenty-nine days or thirty, depending on whether the year is a leap year. The start of the year is not set by that rule. It is determined by the vernal equinox. Because the equinox does not arrive at the same point relative to the Gregorian calendar each year, the Gregorian date that the last day of Azar falls on shifts a little, within a narrow window in late December. A calendar printed with one fixed date for Yalda is therefore right in most years and wrong in some.

There is a second reason a single date misleads, and it is the more common error. Yalda is a night, not a day. It begins in the evening of the last day of Azar and ends on the morning of the first of Dey, and those are two different Gregorian dates, one following the other.

A source that names a single December date has named the evening — the day the night begins on — and left the morning unsaid. The table below carries both, an evening date and a morning date, so that the whole night is accounted for.

Why a printed table disagrees

The evenings Yalda began on

Across the 101 years below, the night began on 3 different Gregorian dates. A printed calendar prints one of them — and names only the evening.

1. December 2020 years

2. December 2178 years

3. December 223 years

Yalda night year by year

Every Yalda night this page documents. The night begins on the evening date and ends on the morning of the next day, so both are listed.

From December 21, 1950 to December 21, 2050.