For the first time since 1977, a full moon will rise on Christmas. Photo by Ismael Mohamad/UPI | License Photo

WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 (UPI) -- A full moon rises every 29.53 days. That makes the chances of a full moon landing on a special day -- like your birthday, or Christmas -- rather slim.

But 2015 is a lucky year. For the first time in 38 years, Christmas Day will host a full moon. Christmas won't get another full moon until 2034.


A NASA spokesperson told ABC News the full moon will peak at just after six in the morning, Eastern Standard Time. According to the Farmer's Almanac, the last full moon in the month of December is called the "Cold Moon" or the "Big Moon."

The last time a full moon rose on Christmas, it was December 25, 1977 -- the Bee Gees were on the radio and Saturday Night Fever was in the theaters. J.R.R. Tolkien was a best-selling author, but none of his books had been made into movies yet.

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Almost a decade prior to the last Christmas-borne full moon, a trio of NASA astronauts spent the holidays orbiting the moon -- the first time man orbited a body other than Earth.

In a live broadcast beamed back from Apollo 8, astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders read from the Bible's Book of Genesis as images of Earth flashed across the screen.

"We were told that on Christmas Eve we would have the largest audience that had ever listened to a human voice," Borman said in 2008, on the 40th anniversary of the feat. "And the only instructions that we got from NASA was to do something appropriate."

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"The first ten verses of Genesis is the foundation of many of the world's religions, not just the Christian religion," explained Lovell. "There are more people in other religions than the Christian religion around the world, and so this would be appropriate to that and so that's how it came to pass."