A Roman Procession Grown From a Jerusalem Pilgrim's Report

Candlemas falls on the second of February, forty days after Christmas, the day this rule fixes because it marks Mary's ritual purification and Christ's presentation in the Temple under the timing set by Levitical law. The earliest description of the feast being kept with any distinctive ceremony comes from the pilgrim Egeria, who recorded a procession and celebration in fourth century Jerusalem on this date, forty days being counted from a Nativity already fixed there. The custom of blessing candles and processing with them, the detail that gives the feast its common English name, is a Roman addition documented from around the seventh century, under Pope Sergius the First, tying the feast to the Gospel description of the aged Simeon recognizing the infant Christ as a light for revelation.

The feast sits at what was traditionally treated as the close of the Christmas season in much of the Western church, the last of the cycle of feasts counted from the Nativity before the calendar turns toward Lent, and the candle blessing that gives it its name spread from Rome through the rest of the Western liturgical tradition over the following centuries. The Eastern churches keep the same event on the same underlying reckoning under the name the Meeting of the Lord, with the same forty day count from the Nativity, though without the candle procession that became the defining Western custom.