With Maduro Gone, Venezuela Begins First October in Years Without Christmas

For the first time in years, Venezuelans began October this Thursday without a mandatorily rescheduled Christmas season — a recurring and quasi-traditional order issued by deposed socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro throughout his rule.

Maduro became the leader of the Venezuelan socialist regime and the dictator of the country in early 2013 following the death of his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, who personally anointed him as his successor in his last public appearance on December 8, 2012 — a now quasi-religious date for the regime. The deposed dictator and his wife Cilia Flores were arrested by American forces during a law enforcement operation in Caracas on January 3. The pair remains detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, awaiting the start of their trial on multiple drug trafficking charges next year.

Venezuela is a majority Catholic nation and, just like the rest of the Christian world, normally celebrates Christmas during a four-week period in December known as Advent, marking the birth of Jesus of Nazareth on December 25, Christmas Day. However, throughout the nearly 13 years that Maduro was in power, the socialist dictator recurrently rescheduled the start of the Christmas season in Venezuela as he saw fit — going against all Christian traditions and attracting the criticism of the Venezuelan Catholic Church, an institution that was the target of numerous attacks and insults from the ruling socialists over the past decades.

The dictator began manipulating the start of the Christmas season in Venezuela to his own desires as early as 2013 during the first year of his rule and continued the trend in almost every subsequent year between the mid-2010s and early 2020s. As part of the dictator’s orders, Venezuelan state-owned institutions and public spaces were forced to put up Christmas decorations as early as September so that those spaces would be “ready” to begin the dictator-ordered “Christmas season.”

Last year, in September 2025, Maduro declared that the 2025 Christmas season would begin on October 1 — two months before the official start of Advent and nearly three months before he was arrested by the United States. To mark the start of Maduro’s mandated “Christmas season,” the Venezuelan socialist regime infamously staged a fireworks show from the Helicoide (“The Helix”), a decades-old structure in Caracas that the regime transformed into its largest and most infamous torture center. Equally bewildering, Maduro claimed in mid-December 2025 that the year 2026 had “already started” in Venezuela, a wild affirmation that he expressed in what would later become the final days of his rule.

At press time, the Venezuelan socialist regime, now under the leadership of “acting President” Delcy Rodríguez, has so far given no indication that it plans to alter the Christmas calendar celebrations in the country in 2026.

Rodríguez, speaking during an official regime event this week, affirmed that “for the first time in many years” all of the pernil (roast pork shoulder) that will be consumed  by Venezuelans during this year’s Christmas period will be produced in the country. Pernil is one of the main dishes served in a traditional Venezuelan Christmas, alongside the flagship hallaca, the pan de jamon (ham bread), and chicken salad. During the collapse of socialism in Venezuela under Maduro’s rule, pernil was on an extensive list of items that became scarce and extremely difficult to obtain for Venezuelans during an already complex situation further exacerbated by the collapse of the nation’s socialist economy. In 2017, Maduro spuriously blamed foreign nations for “sabotaging” the nation’s pernil supply, offering no evidence for his claim.

Maduro also brought forward the 2024 Christmas season to October 2024 — just three months after he celebrated his last sham presidential “election” and launched a brutal dissident crackdown campaign that left thousands detained. At the time, the dictator claimed that his order to bring forward the 2024 Christmas was his way to show “gratitude” for having “won” the July 28, 2024, sham presidential election. Maduro also altered the Christmas season calendar during 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, forcing it to start in either October or November as he saw fit.

For nearly three decades, the Venezuelan socialist regime maintained a notoriously combative stance toward the Venezuelan Catholic Church and its top national ecclesiastical authority, the Episcopal Conference of Venezuela (CEV). Maduro and other members of his socialist regime repeatedly excoriated Venezuelan priests — claiming in 2018 that they were instead “devils in cassocks.” Most notably, in 2014, during the first year of Maduro’s rule and while the regime still mourned the death of Hugo Chávez, the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) “rewrote” the Lord’s Prayer to worship Chávez.

Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.