Reform the calendar so seasons start on the 1st

Reforming the calendar to make the seasons add up

The Gregorian reform of 1582 swallowed ten days at a stroke to correct the drift of the Julian calendar. Four and a half centuries later, the result still has a flaw anyone can check on their phone: the seasons do not begin when the months begin. The equinox and solstice fall between the 21st and the 23rd, midway through the calendar page. If you are going to carry out a radical reform, the proposal essentially says, do the whole thing.

The proposal: winter on January 1, spring on April 1

The idea is simple to state and complicated to carry out. Winter would start on January 1 and last 89 days: January with 30, February with 29 and March with 30. Spring would begin on April 1 (April, May and June, 31 days each). Summer, on July 1, with July and September at 31 and a 32-day August. And autumn, on October 1: October 30, November 29, December 30. They add up to 365.

The arithmetic works out, but it exposes a detail that reformist enthusiasm tends to cover up: the seasons do not last the same length of time. 89 days of winter versus 94 of summer. The calendar would be orderly, not symmetrical. And the readjustment requires swallowing days that never existed, just as in 1582.

Why can’t the year start at perihelion?

Here is the crux of the matter. The day Earth passes through the point closest to the Sun — perihelion — falls between January 2 and 3. It would be the natural candidate for starting the year. The problem is that if it is fixed there, the seasons no longer line up with the 1st of their months. You have to choose: either the year starts at perihelion, or the seasons start on the 1st. Both at once do not work.

The solution being advocated is to sacrifice perihelion and anchor the year to January 1, along with winter. A workaround, yes, but cleaner than the current one.

Russia already divides the seasons by months, but that is not astronomy

In Russia the seasons are organized by calendar months: spring from March 1 to May 31, summer from June 1 to August 31, autumn from September 1 to November 30, and winter from December 1 to February 28 or 29. It is a cultural convention, not an astronomical fact. The Russian equinox still falls when it does across Europe. Confusing an administrative division with a physical phenomenon is the most repeated mistake in the conversation.

The problem with the names: from numerals to the republican calendar

September, October, November and December are out-of-order numerals: the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth months, placed in the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth positions. A nonsense we inherited from Rome. The alternative being championed is that of the French Republican calendar, with its Floréal and its Brumaire: names that refer to time, weather and astronomy instead of a badly counted ordinal. July and August, the emperors’ months, are spared from the adjustment.

Reforming the calendar is one of those tasks no one wants to open because it forces changes to clocks, contracts, calendars of saints’ days and time zones across half the planet. Does anyone dare move January 1?