The Cold Moon is December’s full moon, the one that rises as the year’s hardest weather arrives. In 2026 it falls on Christmas Eve, and it is a supermoon, the last and largest full moon of the year.
The moon of the long nights
The Cold Moon earns its plainest name from the obvious thing: it is the moon of deep winter, of frozen ground and the shortest days. Its other name reaches further. Near the winter solstice the sun sits at its lowest, and because a full moon always rides opposite the sun, the December moon climbs higher and stays up longer than any other full moon of the year. So this is also the Long Night Moon, the one that holds the dark for the most hours, throwing its light across the snow while the sun barely clears the hills.
Older English reckoning placed it against the great midwinter feast. The 8th-century monk Bede recorded the December moon as the Moon Before Yule, the last full light before the turning of the year.
The year’s last supermoon
In 2026 the Cold Moon is a supermoon, a full moon falling near the closest point of its orbit, so a touch wider and brighter than usual. The difference is small enough that most people would not notice it without being told, but it makes a fitting end to the year: the highest, longest-lasting full moon, riding a little closer to Earth, on Christmas Eve. (The same effect, and the surprisingly modern history of the word, is in our Beaver Moon entry from the month before.)
What we are really looking at
The Cold Moon closes the calendar where the Wolf Moon will open it, the same winter light at both ends of the year. It is the moon of the longest nights and the hardest cold, hanging high and patient over the dark while the world waits for the days to lengthen again. In 2026 it does all this on Christmas Eve, which is either a coincidence or a fitting one, depending on how you like to read the sky.
Image: Caspar David Friedrich, “Moonrise” (c. 1835-37). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- The Old Farmer’s Almanac, ‘Full Moon Names and Their Meanings’ (almanac.com)
- Bede, The Reckoning of Time (De temporum ratione), c. 725 CE, on the Moon Before Yule
- NASA, ‘The Next Full Moon is the Cold Moon’ and ‘What Is a Supermoon?’ (science.nasa.gov)