The St. Andrew Christmas Novena

This is the prayer in the wording EWTN prints. It is said fifteen times a day, and your intention is named once in each, at the place marked. To pray it with a voice beside you, listen to it read aloud, with a short spoken introduction.

Begin on November 30, the feast of St. Andrew the Apostle, and keep going every day until Christmas. Most sources, including the Diocese of Little Rock, give the last day as December 24, Christmas Eve; EWTN and the old cards simply say “until Christmas”. Either way it is about twenty-five days, which makes it the longest of the well-known novenas and the only one measured by Advent rather than by nine. If you would like nine days as well, the Christmas novena runs from December 16 to Christmas Eve, and the two can be kept together.

St. Andrew’s feast sits at the very start of Advent. The First Sunday of Advent is the Sunday nearest to November 30, so in some years the novena begins a day or two before Advent and in others a few days into it. It makes no difference: the novena follows the date, not the Sunday.

Fifteen times a day, without it taking over the day. The prayer takes about twenty seconds, so fifteen is five minutes at most. What most people do:

• Five in the morning, five at midday, five at night.
• Count on rosary beads: one decade is ten, and five more gets you there.
• Tie them to things you already do: the kettle, the car, the walk to the school gate.
• Pray it as a family after the evening meal, a few each, until the fifteen are done.

If you miss some, or a whole day, carry on. The count is a way of keeping the prayer in front of you through a busy month, not a test you can fail.

Nobody knows, and it is better to say so than to repeat a story. You will read that it was written by an Irish nun in 1897. No source we could find names her, her community, or a document, and the careful sources do not claim it either: the Diocese of Little Rock says its “origins … are unknown” though it “is believed to have come from Ireland”, and the Dominican nuns of Summit, New Jersey, say the same.

The one fixed date is 1897. The holy cards that spread the prayer carry an imprimatur from the Archbishop of New York dated February 6, 1897. That was Archbishop Corrigan, who led the archdiocese from 1885 to 1902. An imprimatur is a bishop’s statement that a text contains nothing against faith or morals; it tells you the prayer was being printed in New York by then, not who composed it or where.

So the honest summary is: an anonymous Advent prayer, probably Irish in origin, approved for printing in New York in 1897, and prayed ever since.

Because it starts on his day. The prayer never mentions him: it is addressed to “my God” and dwells on the hour of Christ’s birth. ChristmasNovena.com, the site most associated with it, puts it plainly: the novena “is actually directed toward God Himself.”

St. Andrew is still a fitting door into Advent. He is the first person in John’s Gospel to go and fetch someone else for Christ: “He first found his own brother, Simon, and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah!’ … He brought him to Jesus” (John 1:41–42). A novena that runs to Christmas, begun on the day of the apostle who brought his brother to the Messiah, is a good time to pray for someone you would like to bring as well.

If you want a prayer to St. Andrew himself, ask his intercession in your own words; he is the patron of fishermen and of Scotland. The novena, though, is to God.

• “Hail and blessed be the hour and moment” is a greeting to a moment in time, the way the Angelus greets the Annunciation. The whole prayer stands at one instant, the birth, and asks from there.
• “Of the most pure Virgin Mary” is the Church’s faith in the virginal conception and birth of Christ (Luke 1:34–35; Matthew 1:23).
• “At midnight, in Bethlehem, in the piercing cold” is devotion, not Scripture. The Gospel says only that it was night, with “shepherds … keeping watch by night over their flock” (Luke 2:8), and the prophet names Bethlehem (Micah 5:2). The midnight hour comes from the tradition of the Christmas Mass at night, and the cold from the imagination of a Northern Hemisphere winter. Both are there to make you picture it, and they work.
• “In that hour vouchsafe … to hear my prayer and grant my desires”: “vouchsafe” means “graciously grant”. The request is placed inside the moment God gave the world his Son, which is the boldest reason there is to ask him for anything smaller.
• “Through the merits of Our Saviour Jesus Christ, and of His blessed Mother” ends where every Catholic prayer ends, with Christ, and asks Mary’s prayers alongside.

Some pages call it the “miraculous” Christmas novena, and a line repeated on many sites, a diocesan one among them, says that whoever prays it fifteen times a day until Christmas will obtain the favor requested. That is a devotional promise, not the Church’s. No bishop, council or pope has attached a promised result to this prayer, and the Church warns against the idea that a set number of repetitions makes a prayer work: “To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition” (CCC 2111).

What the novena really gives is time. Twenty-five days of returning, fifteen times a day, to the moment of the Incarnation is a way of keeping Advent that is hard to do any other way. Ask for what you want, plainly, and ask as Christ taught: for it, and for God’s will above it. By Christmas Eve, the second half may have become the more important one.

Many people keep the novena for another person: a child who has drifted, a marriage, someone ill, someone who will be alone at Christmas. Name them in the place marked each time. These short prayers are our own, for the end of a day’s fifteen, and are addressed to God: