Fast day.
Commemorated today
- Eve of the Nativity of Christ
What is known
One of the Twelve Great Feasts, and preceded by a forty-day fast.
This is a feast of the Church rather than the commemoration of a person, so there is no life behind it to tell.
- Holy Virgin and Martyr Eugenia and her companions (c. 190)Martyr · d. c. 190
What is known
A martyr died rather than deny Christ. The word is Greek for witness, and the Church uses it in that sense: the death is testimony, not merely a fate. Most of these deaths fall in the Roman persecutions before 313, though the title is not restricted to them.
The year given is about 190.
They are kept together rather than separately, and for most of them the number, the place and the manner of death are the whole of what is recorded.
Appointed readings
- Genesis 1:1–13
- Numbers 24:2–3, 5–9, 17–18
- Micah 4:6–7; 5:2–4
- Isaiah 11:1–10
- Jeremiah (Baruch 3:35–4:4)
- Daniel 2:31–36, 44–45
- Isaiah 9:6–7
- Isaiah 7:10–16; 8:1–4, 9–10
About this page. This is the Menaion date — the fixed calendar. Parishes on the New Calendar keep it on December 24 by the civil calendar. On the Julian calendar this same commemoration is kept on January 6 by the civil calendar. The movable cycle, which turns on the date of Pascha and changes every year, is on the calendar page. Where a life has been written on this site the name links to it; where it has not, only what the commemoration itself attests is shown, and nothing is added to it.