The year starts in November (or sometimes in December)
This series now moves on into the second main section: what I am calling the firmware. This is the way in which we organise and develop our actual practice of reading. I begin with the church year. We have a range of different years we organise our life by, and they all start at different times. The school year in September, the tax year in April, the calendar year in January. Historically it’s moved around a bit. So it’s not really at all out of the ordinary that the church year begins four Sundays before Christmas, a date that usually falls at the end of November, and sometimes at the start of December. The pattern of readings followed in Christian liturgy is tied to this year, so that a new cycle of readings begins on the first of the four Sundays before Christmas, called Advent Sunday, from a Latin word meaning “arrival”. The year begins with preparations for the arrival of Jesus. There are different ways of conceptualising the year. Both the diagrams bel...