I have a pet peeve. It's about the first day of any given 
    season. March 21st is upon us, and broadcasters all over the 
    country happily announce that the first day of spring is here. 
    They'll do it again for the other three seasons, and they're 
    WRONG.

         March 21st (or thereabouts) is the vernal equinox. It means 
    that night and day are exactly the same length. Six months later 
    (or thereabouts), it will happen again, at the autumnal equinox. In 
    between those two days are the solstices, summer and winter. 
    They cannot be the first day of either season, because they are, 
    respectively, Midsummer Day and Midwinter Day. On the first, 
    it's the longest day of the year, and on the second, it's the 
    longest night of the year. This is why we have a big party around 
    Midwinter. It's to reassure ourselves that the sun is coming 
    back. Christians might like to dress it up as the birth of Christ, 
    and they're welcome to, and retailers might dress it up as the 
    busiest shopping season of the year, and they're welcome to 
    that too. In reality, whether your hook is the birth of a savior 
    or a tangible recognition of people important to you, it's really 
    about the same thing: surviving the dark.

         The autumnal equinox, which we don't particularly celebrate, 
    comes right before Hallowe'en, which once upon a time was the 
    Celtic festival of Samhain. Spirits ride out on that night, and in 
    Wales, there's a tradition which goes that if you sit up all night 
    on All Hallow's Eve in a churchyard, you'll hear a voice crying out 
    the names of all the people who will die in the next year.

         Midsummer Day has a kind of magic, too, mostly noticeable 
    when the day grows long and warm and begins to wax into 
    twilight, even though we all feel that it should have been dark 
    hours ago. There's a kind of fuzziness to the air, soft and eerie, 
    like the dusk is a curtain, and there are fairies on the other side, 
    watching you, waiting for you. Once I went truck surfing on 
    Midsummer night, and we came to a stop sign, cradled between 
    a field and a stand of forest. Everywhere we looked, the place 
    was alive with fireflies. Just there, hovering over the field like a 
    cloud of gold dust, winking in the trees like Christmas lights. For 
    some very long moments, I would not have sworn that I was 
    standing in the bed of a pickup truck in rural Maryland.

         And then there's the vernal equinox. Spring, say the 
    announcers, even though in many places, winter has not yet 
    loosed its grip on us, and the trees show not the slighest 
    inclination to bud. And if this isn't proof of how willing we are
    to accept some arbitrary proclamation, I don't know what is. 
    When your local DJ or weatherman tells you it's the first day of 
    spring, call them up and ask them to prove it.


         Addendum. After I wrote this, I thought how embarrassing it 
    would be if somebody could prove me wrong. So I called the 
    Federal Government Information number. They referred me to the 
    Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. A very nice man there 
    told me exactly what I already knew, only in more scientific 
    terms. The equinoxes and solstices mark the year into quarters, 
    astrologically. In other words, the year is divided into four 
    ections: most dark, most light, and two even sections. 
    Meterologically, the seasons follow about six weeks later, 
    because of the amount of time it takes the earth to warm up and 
    cool down. But other than light, there's no official start to the 
    seasons. Happy vernal equinox, everybody.