Genna

Both dates are the same feast counted on different calendars. The Ethiopian church kept the older reckoning, and Tahsas 29 works out to 7 January on the Gregorian calendar. Nothing was moved. The gap is the same one that puts the whole Ethiopian calendar seven or eight years behind.

In an Ethiopian leap year the date is written Tahsas 28 so that it still lands on 7 January, which is why converters sometimes show two different Ethiopian dates for what Ethiopians treat as one fixed day.

The forty three days before Genna are a fast: no meat, no dairy, one meal a day for the observant. It ends with an overnight service. People arrive at church around six in the evening, dressed in white netela, and the liturgy runs until around three in the morning. Lalibela draws tens of thousands of pilgrims to its rock-hewn churches for it.

The meal afterwards is doro wat with injera. Gifts are not really part of the day, though that is changing in the cities and in the diaspora.

Genna is also the name of a field game, something between hockey and shinty, played with a curved stick and a wooden ball. Tradition says the shepherds who heard of the birth played it in celebration. Men and boys still play it in rural areas on the day, and the holiday takes its name from the game as much as the other way round.