About Sleeps Until
Sleeps Until counts down to the year's big days the way families actually talk about them: in sleeps. Not “in 59 days”, but “59 more bedtimes”. Every counter on the site is live, exact to the second, and resets itself for next year the moment a big day passes.
How the dates are worked out
Fixed-date days — Christmas (December 25), Halloween (October 31), Valentine's Day (February 14), Independence Day (July 4), New Year's Day (January 1) — are simple. The moving ones follow their public calendar rules: US Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of November, Mother's Day the second Sunday of May, Father's Day the third Sunday of June, Black Friday the day after Thanksgiving, and Easter Sunday is computed with the standard Gregorian calendar algorithm (the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after March 21). The first day of summer targets the summer solstice, which falls on June 20 or 21 depending on the year; back-to-school has no single date, so the homepage uses September 1 as an approximation and the Create Your Own tool exists for your school's real date.
A “sleep” is counted as the number of nights between tonight and the morning of the big day, which equals the number of calendar days between today and the date. All counting happens in your own browser, in your own time zone — so the number you see is the number that is true where you live.
Part of a small family of free tools
Sleeps Until is built and maintained by ORBITFRAME, and sits alongside a handful of other free, no-signup tools linked in the footer. Everything runs in your browser; there are no accounts and nothing to install. A Pro version ($9/mo, coming soon) is planned with printable countdown chains and reminder emails — the free counters will stay free.