Equinoxes and Solstices

🇺🇸How does United States mark Equinoxes and Solstices? · Daylight Saving Time

The United States takes no holiday for a solstice but moves its clocks twice a year by statute. 15 U.S.C. §260a advances the standard time of every zone by one hour from 2 a.m. on the second Sunday of March until 2 a.m. on the first Sunday of November. A state lying entirely in one time zone may exempt itself by law — Arizona and Hawaii do — and a state split across zones may exempt itself entirely or zone by zone. Subsection (b) declares Congress's express intent to supersede any state or local law setting different dates. The current dates come from the Energy Policy Act of 2005; the rule was also rewritten in 1966, 1972 and 1986. This is the one date on this page a legislature can simply change: 8 March to 1 November in 2026, 14 March to 7 November in 2027, 12 March to 5 November in 2028.

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🇯🇵How does Japan mark Equinoxes and Solstices? · お彼岸（秋彼岸）

Autumn higan works the same way, seven days centred on the September equinox; the observatory lists the entry day as 20 September in both 2026 and 2027. The offering changes name from botamochi to ohagi, though it is the same sweet renamed for the season. Here the Buddhist observance and the statute agree on the reason as well as the date: the holiday's purpose written into the Act is honouring ancestors and remembering the dead.

eco.mtk.nao.ac.jp ↗www8.cao.go.jp ↗

🇯🇵How does Japan mark Equinoxes and Solstices? · 秋分の日

In the same statute, Autumnal Equinox Day is the one holiday out of sixteen whose stated purpose names the dead: to honour ancestors and remember those who have passed. Its date is written the same way — "the autumnal equinox day" — and settled the same way. In 2026 it lands on Wednesday 23 September, while Respect-for-the-Aged Day, the third Monday of September, falls on the 21st. The 22nd is sandwiched between two holidays and therefore becomes a holiday itself under Article 3(3), producing five straight days off from Saturday the 19th. That clause only ever fires because the autumnal equinox drifts between 22 and 24 September.

www8.cao.go.jp ↗nao.ac.jp ↗

🇯🇵How does Japan mark Equinoxes and Solstices? · 冬至

The winter solstice is not a holiday in Japan. In 2026 the moment falls at 05:50 Japan time on 22 December. The customs are food and bathing: eating pumpkin — nankin, one of the foods whose name carries the syllable "n," said to bring luck — and soaking in a bath of yuzu citrus for health through the winter. Materials from the Kyushu agricultural bureau of the agriculture ministry call the day ichiyo-raifuku, the return of the light, and note that pumpkin is a summer crop that grows sweeter in storage, which is why a summer vegetable ends up on a midwinter table. That same instant is recorded in Taiwan as 04:50 and in Indonesia as 03:49 — one event, three clocks.

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🇨🇳How does China mark Equinoxes and Solstices?冬至

The winter solstice is not a day off in China. The Measures on Holidays for National Annual Festivals and Memorial Days (State Council Order No. 795, fourth revision of 10 November 2024, in force 1 January 2025) list seven festivals with public holidays, and exactly one of them is dated by a solar term: Qingming, which the text describes as falling on the day of Qingming itself — a point on the sun's path at 15 degrees of ecliptic longitude, not a lunar date, despite the wording. Which days are actually off is set separately every year: State Council General Office circular No. 7 of 2025, issued 4 November 2025, gave Qingming 2026 three days, 4 to 6 April, with no make-up working day. The solar terms themselves were listed as national intangible cultural heritage in 2006 and inscribed by UNESCO on 30 November 2016 as knowledge of time developed through observation of the sun's annual motion; winter-solstice rituals such as the Sanmen jidong ceremony joined the extension list in 2014. What people eat splits along an old line: dumplings in the north, tangyuan in the south.

mct.gov.cn ↗gov.cn ↗

🇹🇼How does Taiwan mark Equinoxes and Solstices?冬至

Taiwan also gives no day off for the winter solstice, and its Act on Commemorative Days and Holidays never mentions it at all. Two days in the whole Act are dated by solar term: Tomb-Sweeping Day, "set on the day of Qingming" (Article 5(1)(3)), which is a day off, and Farmers' Day, "set on the day of Lichun" (Article 5(4)), which is not. Because the Qingming date moves, Article 6(2) had to add a collision rule: when Children's Day and Tomb-Sweeping Day land on the same date, the day off is taken the day before — unless that falls on a Thursday, in which case it is taken the day after. That is not hypothetical. By the Central Weather Administration's calendar tables, Qingming 2028 falls on 4 April, which is Children's Day, and 4 April 2028 is a Tuesday, so the holiday moves back to 3 April. The administration publishes solar-term times in Taiwan time; the 2026 solstice is 22 December at 04:50. At home people eat tangyuan and take winter tonics, and the saying that a bowl of tangyuan makes you a year older has outlived every statute.

law.moj.gov.tw ↗cwa.gov.tw ↗

🇮🇳How does India mark Equinoxes and Solstices?मकर संक्रांति (Makar Sankranti)

Makar Sankranti is the day the sun enters Capricorn. A Ministry of Culture release dated 14 January 2025 describes it as marking the sun's turn towards the northern hemisphere — but astronomically that turn happens at the December solstice, on the 21st or 22nd, more than three weeks earlier. The gap comes from the method: Indian reckoning pins the twelve signs to the fixed stars rather than to the equinox point, and the slow wobble of Earth's axis pushes the entry date later by about a day every seventy years, so a festival that once sat on the solstice has drifted into mid-January. The names change by state — Pongal in Tamil Nadu, Magh Bihu in Assam, Uttarayan in Gujarat, where the sky fills with kites. There is no single all-India public holiday for it; each state and each employer works from its own list.

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🇯🇵How does Japan mark Equinoxes and Solstices? · 節分

Setsubun is not a holiday, yet it is one of the most-searched dates in the Japanese calendar, and its date is entirely at the mercy of the sun: risshun is the day containing the moment solar longitude reaches 315 degrees, and setsubun is the day before it. The observatory published a note when this became visible — setsubun fell on 2 February in 2021, the first time since 1897, one hundred and twenty-four years; it was 2 February again in 2025; in 2026, 2027 and 2028 it returns to 3 February. The ritual is mamemaki, throwing roasted soybeans to the shout of "demons out, fortune in." Kyoto's cultural properties division explains that Japan has long scattered the five grains along with salt and sand to drive off malign influence, and gives competing reasons for the soybean: a Chinese classic saying the bean kills demon-poison and stops pain, and a pun in which mame, bean, is heard as "demon's eye" and then as "demon destroyed." The beans must be roasted — fukumame, lucky beans — and the city of Kanoya gives two reasons: to roast, iru, is a homophone for to shoot, and a raw bean missed in the clean-up might sprout, which reads as bad luck. Agriculture ministry material dates the custom to the Muromachi period, notes that the thrower was traditionally the toshiotoko, the man born under the year's zodiac sign, or the head of the household, and that you then eat as many beans as your age — Kanoya says your counted age, the ministry says your age or your age plus one — for a long life without illness; in Hokkaido, the northeast and southern Kyushu people mostly throw peanuts instead. The doorway has its own rite: the Mie prefectural history records a grilled sardine head skewered on a sprig of holly and stuck outside the door or window, thorns and burnt-fish stink together turning back evil, known in the prefecture as yaikagashi, "burnt stink," and locally also as "demon's eye-poke"; Kanoya adds that parts of western Japan do not merely hang the sardine but eat it. The ehomaki roll went national only recently: the ministry explains that the eho is the compass direction occupied that year by the year-god, fixed by the year's heavenly stem — its worked example gives 2023 as south-southeast — and you face that way and eat a whole thick roll in silence without cutting it, often with seven fillings for the seven lucky gods, since cutting it would mean cutting a tie. The custom had been forgotten and was revived by a 1977 campaign by Osaka's seaweed wholesalers, then pushed nationwide by convenience-store marketing. It is now a policy file too: every year the ministry sends food retailers a notice asking them to sell to actual demand and cut waste, and the one dated 24 December 2025 covers the 2026 season.

eco.mtk.nao.ac.jp ↗eco.mtk.nao.ac.jp ↗

🇮🇩How does Indonesia mark Equinoxes and Solstices?Hari Tanpa Bayangan (Kulminasi Utama)

Indonesia has no holiday for a change of season; the equator runs through the country and the year divides into a rainy and a dry season rather than four. What the meteorological, climatological and geophysical agency does publish every year is something else: Hari Tanpa Bayangan, the day without shadows, when the sun's declination matches a place's latitude and a vertical object's noon shadow folds underneath it and disappears. Every city has its own date. In 2026 the first round runs from 21 February at Baa in East Nusa Tenggara to 5 April at Sabang in Aceh, and the second from 7 September at Sabang to 21 October at Baa; Jakarta gets 5 March at 12:04 and 9 October at 11:40. Pontianak, which sits on the equator, falls on 20 March and 23 September — the equinoxes themselves. The same bulletin records the southern turning point for 2026 at 03:49 on 22 December, western Indonesia time.

bmkg.go.id ↗content.bmkg.go.id ↗

🇯🇵How does Japan mark Equinoxes and Solstices? · お彼岸（春彼岸）

Higan is a zassetsu, a traditional calendar marker, not a holiday. It runs seven days centred on the equinox, and the observatory's tables publish the entry day: 17 March in 2026, 18 March in 2027. Families visit graves, temples hold higan-e services, and botamochi rice cakes are offered. None of that is state business — but because the middle day is the statutory holiday, Japanese families in practice sweep graves on a date computed by an observatory. Search demand sits here rather than on the holiday: far more people look up "ohigan" than "shunbun no hi."

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🇯🇵How does Japan mark Equinoxes and Solstices? · 春分の日

Article 2 of Japan's Act on National Holidays (Act No. 178 of 1948) does not give Vernal Equinox Day a month and a day. Where the other holidays list a date, this one lists "the vernal equinox day," with the stated purpose of praising nature and cherishing living things. Which calendar day that is comes from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and it becomes legally settled only when the observatory's Reki-yoko tables are printed in the official gazette on 1 February of the preceding year — the 2026 edition was released on 3 February 2025, the 2027 edition on 2 February 2026. So Japan's 2028 holidays are, as this page is written, not yet fixed in law; the observatory's computed value is 20 March. The 2026 equinox itself fell at 23:46 Japan time on 20 March. Fourteen minutes later and the holiday would have moved to the 21st.

www8.cao.go.jp ↗nao.ac.jp ↗

🇧🇷Does Brazil have Equinoxes and Solstices?

Brazil has no holiday tied to an equinox or a solstice. Law No. 662 of 6 April 1949, as amended by Law No. 10,607 of 2002, lists seven national holidays — 1 January, 21 April, 1 May, 7 September, 2 November, 15 November and 25 December — and not one of them is dated by the position of the sun. The only time Brazilian law chased the seasons was daylight saving, and that has been abolished: Decree No. 9,772 of 25 April 2019 ends summer time throughout the national territory in its first article and, in its second, repeals twenty-five separate summer-time decrees issued since 1991 in one sweep. Worth remembering too that Brazil is in the southern hemisphere, so the December solstice opens summer here, not winter.

planalto.gov.br ↗planalto.gov.br ↗