Shifting the solstice date ?

[Externet]

Would it be possible ?

If there was an intention to make winter solstice for the northern hemisphere to coincide with December 31, would counting a few years of februarys with 29 or 30 days instead and substracting a day or two to other months for the same few years; then returning to 'normal' when done...

Or that would result in the opposite shift direction ?   I have a mental fart on it.  Is there other hurdles I do not notice ?

[swansont]

If you added a day, the subsequent solstices and equinoxes would happen a calendar day earlier. (something that should be happening Mar 1 shifts to Feb 29) If you added a day to one month but subtracted it to a later month, there’s no net effect afterwards. We do this with daylight saving. Noon has not moved over the years.

You could simply not observe leap years for a while, but why?

[Peterkin]

Or you could just mark a different day on the calendar, maybe for the summer one, as well, just to be fair. One day, either way, wouldn't matter so much as far as observance goes. But if you wanted to move it 10 days, you'd either have to end the year on December 21st, and move every other date up 10 places, or remake the calendar. Hardly seems worth the effort. And the religious wouldn't like it one bit - especially the Christians, who picked their saviour's birthday to correspond with their approximation of the solstice, and incidentally the pagan festival of Yule.  

[swansont]

2 hours ago, Peterkin said:

Or you could just mark a different day on the calendar, maybe for the summer one, as well, just to be fair. One day, either way, wouldn't matter so much as far as observance goes. But if you wanted to move it 10 days, you'd either have to end the year on December 21st, and move every other date up 10 places, or remake the calendar. Hardly seems worth the effort. And the religious wouldn't like it one bit - especially the Christians, who picked their saviour's birthday to correspond with their approximation of the solstice, and incidentally the pagan festival of Yule.  

It’s happened before (adopting the Gregorian calendar), and lots of people didn’t like losing 10-11 days. That shift was caused by not having the solstices on the right days, so Easter wasn’t on the right day, and the Christians might object to mucking it up all over again

[Peterkin]

There may be better calendars, but the one we have works well enough to go on with.