Do Mormons Celebrate Christmas? Yes, at Home and at Church

Yes. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints celebrate Christmas as the birth of Jesus Christ. Others often call them Mormons, a nickname the Church asks people not to use. They keep Christmas at home and at church, with a Sunday Christmas service, the First Presidency’s Christmas Devotional and Light the World, a season of service.

Their Christmas story has a second scene that most other Christians do not read. The Book of Mormon, which Latter-day Saints read as scripture beside the Bible, tells of believers in the Americas who waited for a sign of the Saviour’s birth: a night without darkness. Unbelievers had set a day on which the believers would be put to death if the sign did not come. Their prophet Nephi prayed all that day, and the answer came: “Lift up your head and be of good cheer; for behold, the time is at hand, and on this night shall the sign be given, and on the morrow come I into the world” (3 Nephi 1:13). Then, the book says, “at the going down of the sun there was no darkness” (3 Nephi 1:15).

Latter-day Saints keep the feast by giving, and they give to strangers on a large scale. The Church’s Giving Machines, vending machines that sell gifts for strangers, stood in 126 cities in 21 countries in the 2025 season. Nearly a million people came to them, and about 4.8 million items were bought for people in need.

How do Latter-day Saints celebrate Christmas?

Much as other Christian families do. The Church’s own Christmas page says there is “no one ‘right’ way to celebrate,” and that for many members the season includes “family gatherings, singing Christmas songs, reading the Christmas story, attending Church meetings and activities, and offering charitable service in our communities.” Through December the Church holds Christmas parties “where the whole neighborhood is invited,” along with youth activities and charity drives.

The Church calls Christmas “a sacred time” for its members “to remember that our Heavenly Father loves His children so much He sent His Son to show us the way to lasting happiness.” Its page opens with the angels’ song from Luke, and it tells the birth from the Gospel: Mary “brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7).

Do Latter-day Saints go to church at Christmas?

Yes. “While every Sunday service throughout the year focuses on the joy we can find through Jesus Christ,” the Church says, “the Sunday before Christmas (or on Christmas Day) is a special service that celebrates His birth through words and music.” Visitors are welcome. The same page invites anyone to find a congregation nearby, where missionaries “can share details of our Christmas worship service and save you a seat.”

What is the First Presidency’s Christmas Devotional?

It is a Christmas broadcast from the Church’s First Presidency each December, with messages from Church leaders about the birth of Christ and music from The Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square. The 2025 devotional was on Sunday, 7 December, and the 2026 devotional is set for Sunday, 6 December.

At the 2025 devotional, Susan H. Porter, the Primary General President, who leads the Church’s organisation for children, told why Christmas Eve is her favourite night of the year. Every Christmas Eve she can remember, she has gathered with family to read Luke 2. Then she set that night beside the night in the Book of Mormon: “The sun had set, but the sky was filled with light.” She spoke of two Christmas Eves in hospital with her husband, Bruce. The first time he got better. The second time, in 2016, he died two days later at home with the family around him. “Were tears shed, deep sorrow felt, along with loss and loneliness? Yes,” she said. “And did we feel the light of God’s love? Yes.” Her promise to her listeners was this: “there will be no permanent darkness when our nights come.”

What is Light the World?

Light the World is the Church’s Christmas call to serve, begun in 2016. The Church’s Christmas page calls it “a global movement to love and serve as the Savior did in celebration of His birth.” The ideas it offers are small enough for anyone: “Send a Christmas card to a friend.” “Ask to be forgiven and settle a grudge or past issue.” “Provide a meal for someone in need.”

The Giving Machines joined it in 2017. A visitor chooses a gift for a stranger, such as food, clean water, clothing or school supplies, and the partner charities deliver it in the months after Christmas. The Church “covers all operational expenses,” it says, so “100% of the donated money goes to participating nonprofits.” Since the first machine appeared, about US$70 million has been given through them.

The Church lights its headquarters too, a small picture of the night Nephi waited for. Each evening from 28 November 2025 to 1 January 2026, Christmas lights shone across Temple Square in Salt Lake City, while renovation continued on the Salt Lake Temple.

Do Latter-day Saints believe Jesus was born on 6 April?

Some of their leaders have taught so, and the Church today speaks more broadly of the spring. Its Christmas page puts it this way: “Along with most religious scholars, we acknowledge that the birth of the Savior didn’t happen on December 25. We believe it happened during the early spring in Bethlehem, but we join with other Christian denominations in using this time of year to come together in the joyous celebration of Christmas.”

The April date comes from the first verse of a revelation to Joseph Smith on the founding of the Church, now Doctrine and Covenants 20. It dates that founding “one thousand eight hundred and thirty years since the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the flesh,” on “the sixth day of the month which is called April.” An older Church study manual, in its note on that verse, quotes two presidents of the Church who read it as the anniversary of his birth. President Harold B. Lee said in 1973 that 6 April commemorates “the anniversary of the birth of the Savior, our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ,” and President Spencer W. Kimball said plainly in 1975, “Christ was born on the sixth of April.” Either way, Latter-day Saints keep 25 December with other Christians. The wider question of the date has its own article: when was Jesus born?

How is a Latter-day Saint Christmas different from other Christians’?

The carols, the family gatherings and the reading of Luke are shared with most other churches. The difference is in the scriptures they add. The Church’s Christmas page names Isaiah and Micah in the Old Testament and Alma and Samuel in the Book of Mormon as prophets who “helped people look forward with joy to the Savior’s coming,” and it adds the Book of Mormon’s account of the night without darkness.

Behind that lies a deeper difference. Latter-day Saints believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and the Saviour. Of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, the Church teaches: “Although the members of the Godhead are distinct beings with distinct roles, they are one in purpose and doctrine.” The Nicene Creed, which most churches confess, says instead that the Son is “of one Being with the Father.” So Latter-day Saints say they are Christians, while most other churches, holding to the creed, do not count them as Christian in the creed’s sense. Both sides of that question are set out in are Mormons Christian? On Christmas itself, though, they stand with most of their neighbours. Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are sometimes confused with them, keep no Christmas at all.

So whatever church we belong to, we know nights like the ones Sister Porter spoke of: a hospital room, an empty place at the table, a year that has gone dark. We keep Christmas because the light came into nights like those and has not gone out. Near the end of her talk she quoted the hymn “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” which many churches sing at Christmas: “In thy dark streets shineth the everlasting Light.”

Related reading

• Do Mormons celebrate Easter?
• Do Mormons believe in Jesus Christ?
• Do Mormons believe that Jesus is God?
• Why don’t Jehovah’s Witnesses celebrate Christmas?
• Is it a sin to celebrate Christmas?