> Midwinter is, at first blush, a stupid time for the new year, yes. But so is autumn; the changes in the natural world that you talk about are all deaths and endings. Even the harvest is simply the end of the growing season. Spring, however, is all about beginnings as new animals are born, and new plants stick their heads above the snow.
>
I think one could take a more positive view of autumn, and I think it's a decent candidate for a new year celebration.

Sure, the most apparent change is the colour of the leaves, and you can see it as a death or an ending, but in between the colour change and the "fall", the trees are a more spectacular sight than at any other time of the year. Also, those leaves are the real beginning of next year's topsoil and new growth.

Also, the harvest isn't so much a death as the culmination of a year's toil and effort. A well-earned reward for honest work, coupled with a time of plentiful food, seem just the time to celebrate.

Autumn is also a good time to look back on the year that was. The apparent ending of everything around us is a natural time for retrospection, before all the evidence gets covered by a blanket of white.

> Spring is, in every sense, the birth of the new year and autumn is the death of the old year. If you insist on one year beginning as the last ends, rather than having a dead period through the winter, then midwinter is the only possible choice.

I agree with the previous poster that spring is too gradual a change to properly celebrate. By the time you realize it's happening, the meaningful part of it is over. Any choice of date would necessarily be arbitrary.

^v^:)^v^
F"it's also hard to go out and celebrate on Jan 1 when you live somewhere cold"B