The Seasons Are Wrong

The Seasons are Wrong

April 2026

It is with deep regret that I must shatter long held illusions about the structure of our world. The seasons don't make sense. Our calendar is wrong. The things you believe to be summer, winter, spring, and fall are not as they seem. The "first day" of any season, the most broken concept of all, has misled untold billions.

Here's the calendar you're familiar with if you're from North America:

• Summer Solstice (start of summer): June 21
• Fall Equinox (start of fall): September 23
• Winter Solstice (start of winter): December 21
• Spring Equinox (start of spring): March 21

Let's look at these dates in relation to the length of day:

Summer solstice — the first day of summer is the point at which the days start getting shorter. Try to reconcile that. Summer, the season that, if I may speak for all of us, we identify with the hottest part of the year and the longest days, starts when the days get shorter? This is a conspiracy. It is equally senseless for all the other seasons. The first day of winter is when the days start getting longer. You might think that sounds more like the first day of spring, but you would be wrong.

Here are what the seasons look like in relation to day length:

This feels wrong. Culturally, summer and winter should represent opposite extremes, while spring and fall should represent the transitions between them. Applying this opinion to the diagram above, summer should represent the period under the curve with the maximum area, and winter with the minimum area.

If we do this, we'll get a new calendar. Instead of summer starting on the summer solstice, summer will start halfway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice (~May 7). This puts summer solstice in the middle of the summer, instead of the start of summer.

Here are the full dates of my new proposed calendar:

• Summer starts: May 7
• Fall starts: August 9
• Winter starts: November 6
• Spring starts: February 21

Addendum

I've been freaking out about this for the better part of ten years, and originally wrote this in 2018. Only recently did I have it explained to me by an LLM that this is mostly a North American tradition, and much of Europe, Iran, the ancient Romans (among many others) have a rich history of considering the summer solstice the middle of summer. Which makes a lot of sense.