Editing the date formatting of x-axis tick labels

I am looking to edit the formatting of the dates on the x-axis. The picture below shows how they appear on my bar graph by default. I would like to remove the repetition of 'Dec' and '2012' and just have the actual date numbers along the x-axis.

Any suggestions as to how I can do this?

enter image description here

Solution

In short:

import matplotlib.dates as mdates
myFmt = mdates.DateFormatter('%d')
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(myFmt)

Many examples on the matplotlib website. The one I most commonly use is here