While it seems the question was answered per the OP’s request, none of the answers give a good way to get a datetime.date object instead of a datetime.datetime. So for those searching and finding this thread:
datetime.date has no .strptime method; use the one on datetime.datetime instead and then call .date() on it to receive the datetime.date object.
Like so:
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.strptime('2014-12-04', '%Y-%m-%d').date()
datetime.date(2014, 12, 4)