Candlemas, on 2 February, keeps the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, forty days after his birth, when, following the Law, Mary came for her purification and the child was presented to God and greeted by the aged Simeon and the prophetess Anna. Simeon's song, the Nunc Dimittis, "a light to lighten the nations", gives the feast its theme and its name: the day is marked by the blessing of candles and a procession of light, the light standing for Christ revealed to the world.
The feast is old, attested in fourth-century Jerusalem by the pilgrim Egeria, and it closes the Christmas-Epiphany cycle at its fortieth day, the point at which, in many traditions, the crib is finally put away and the "forty days of Christmas" end. In the agricultural year it became a marker of the turn toward spring, tied to weather lore (the ancestor of Groundhog Day) and, in the British Isles, overlapping the Celtic Imbolc and the feast of Brigid. In the East it is the Great Feast of the Meeting (Hypapante), the encounter of the infant Christ with Simeon, understood as the meeting of the Old and New Covenants.