The St. Andrew Christmas Novena
The one that is prayed fifteen times a day for twenty-five days
The St. Andrew Christmas Novena is nine days of prayer asking St. Andrew the Apostle to intercede, traditionally prayed for a particular intention brought to the coming of Christ at Christmas. The feast day is 30 November, the feast of St. Andrew. AngelGuard publishes when to begin, how the nine days work, and what the novena asks for.
Quick facts
What is the St. Andrew the Apostle novena?
The St. Andrew Christmas Novena is the best known of the Advent devotions and the one that breaks the usual rules. It is not nine days. It runs from the feast of St. Andrew on 30 November to Christmas Eve, twenty-five days, and its single short prayer is traditionally said fifteen times a day. That repetition is the whole character of it. The prayer is one sentence long, a meditation on the hour and the moment of Christ’s birth, and saying it fifteen times means it stops being something you read and becomes something you carry. People pray it while walking, in the car, waiting for a kettle. By the second week most people find they are no longer choosing to say it. Despite its name it is not addressed to St. Andrew, and that surprises people. It is named for his feast day, which is simply when it begins. The prayer itself is directed to God and dwells on the Incarnation. It has no official liturgical status, which is worth stating plainly. It is a private devotion, widely loved and widely circulated, and the Church neither mandates it nor discourages it. Nor does it come with a guarantee, whatever some circulated versions claim. Devotions that promise a specific outcome in exchange for a specific number of repetitions have drifted away from prayer and toward transaction, and the Church has always been wary of that framing.
How to pray it
Say the prayer fifteen times a day from 30 November through 24 December. Fifteen sounds heavy until you try it, and then it turns out to be a few minutes spread across a day. Split it rather than sitting down to do all fifteen at once. Five in the morning, five at midday, five at night is the way most people who keep it actually keep it. Hold one intention across the whole stretch. Twenty-five days is long enough that a wandering intention becomes no intention. And treat a missed day as a missed day rather than a failure. Ignore any version that tells you the count must be perfect for the prayer to be heard. That is not how the Church understands prayer.
About the prayer text
Several versions of this novena circulate, and the wording is traditional rather than something to be improvised. Rather than publish a text we have not verified against a reliable Catholic source, this page gives you the structure, the timing, and the intention. Take the words themselves from your parish, your missal, or a Catholic publisher, and stay with one version for the full nine days.