From 30 November to Christmas Eve

Fifteen times a day, every day of Advent.

Despite its name, this is not a novena to St. Andrew and it does not run for nine days. It begins on his feast, 30 November, and is prayed fifteen times a day until Christmas — twenty-five days of returning to the same few lines. It is the most widely prayed Advent devotion in the English-speaking Catholic world.

The Prayer

Hail and blessed be the hour and moment
in which the Son of God was born
of the most pure Virgin Mary,
at midnight, in Bethlehem,
in the piercing cold.

In that hour, vouchsafe, O my God,
to hear my prayer and grant my desires,
through the merits of Our Saviour Jesus Christ,
and of His blessed Mother. Amen.

How to Pray It

• Begin on 30 November, the Feast of St. Andrew, and pray until Christmas Eve.
• Pray it fifteen times each day. Five in the morning, five at midday, five at night is the usual division.
• Hold one intention throughout the whole season.
• Missing a day is not a failure — pick it up again the next morning.

About This Prayer

The fifteen repetitions are not a magic number and no promise attaches to them officially. What they do is unmistakable in practice: by the second week of Advent the words are running underneath your day, and Christmas arrives with the cold, the hour and the birth already fixed in your mind. It is a devotion designed to make a season out of a calendar.

Families often pray five of the fifteen together at the evening meal, leaving the rest to each person’s day.