Countdown: Days and Sleeps Until Any Date
How many sleeps until the big day? Pick an event or a date and see the nights, weekdays, weekend days and time left, with a star for every night still to go.
Count from another moment instead of now
How it works
Pick an event chip (Christmas, New Year, Halloween, the weekend, next Friday or Monday, the end of the month) or Custom date and choose a day, plus a time if the moment matters. Named events roll over by themselves: after Christmas, the Christmas chip counts to next year's. Choose the time zone whose midnights should count; it defaults to your device's zone. Everything is worked out in your browser and nothing is uploaded.
Sleeps are the midnights you pass before the target day starts, so from any time on 24 December, Christmas is 1 sleep away. That is always the same number as the calendar days between the two dates. It is not the same as whole 24-hour days: at 8 pm on Christmas Eve only 4 hours are left, so the 24-hour count is 0, which is why simple countdown timers often look one day short. Counting both ends adds the starting day too, the way some event calendars count.
Weekdays (Monday to Friday) and weekend days split the days you will wake up to, from tomorrow up to and including the target day, so the two always add up to the sleeps. They do not remove bank holidays; for that, see the bank holiday list or Anvil's working days API.
The star strip shows one star per night still to go, ending in a sun for daybreak on the big day (long waits group the stars by the week). Add Started waiting on and the nights already slept light up, with a progress bar showing how far through the wait you are. The banner's sky changes with the clock in the chosen zone: dawn, day, dusk or night. That is a clock-based guide, not the real sunrise.
Times are exact across daylight-saving changes, because the time left comes from real timestamps; if the clocks change before your date, the results mention it. Copy share link keeps your event, zone and dates in the address. Need the numbers in a bot or a script? Anvil's free countdown API returns the same fields as JSON with no key. To measure an age or a duration between two past dates, use the date difference calculator.
Questions
How many sleeps until Christmas?
Press the Christmas chip: the headline shows the sleeps from right now in your time zone. A sleep is a midnight passed, so on Christmas Eve the answer is 1 and on Christmas Day it says it's today.
Why is it 1 sleep but 0 days?
Sleeps count midnights; whole days count 24-hour blocks. Late in the evening before an event there is one midnight to go but less than 24 hours left.
Are bank holidays taken out of the weekdays?
No. Weekdays here are simply Monday to Friday. The bank holidays page lists each region's holidays, and Anvil's /v1/workdays endpoint counts working days without them.
Does the target day count?
Yes, as the day you arrive: 24 to 25 December is 1 calendar day and 1 sleep, and 25 December is the one weekday in between. Counting both ends would make it 2.
Which time zone does it use?
Your device's zone unless you choose another. Midnight in Auckland comes many hours before midnight in London, so the same moment can be a different number of sleeps in each place.
Is anything stored or sent?
No. The maths runs in your browser. Your choices live only in the page address, so a copied share link opens the same countdown.
Is there an API?
Yes. Anvil's keyless /v1/countdown endpoint at api.oddlathe.com returns sleeps, weekdays, weekend days, time left and progress as JSON.