Excel 2003

I have a worksheet with the following data in cells B7:C12.

Dept. Date
DOC 11/13/2008
DOT 12/1/2008
AGR 12/12/2008
AGR 12/23/2008
AGR 1/10/2009
DOJ 2/10/2009

I need a way to count all the occurrences for a given department name that
fall into a given date range. For example, I need to count all the entries
for "AGR" in the month of December. Using COUNTIF() I can count all
occurrences of "AGR", but I can't figure out how to get just the ones in the
month of December.

Currently, the file is very small, but it may well grow to be thousands of
lines, so I need a solution that will perform well for a large amount of
data.

Any help that you can offer will be greatly appreciated.

--Tom