Winter Event

Only if you judge winter by guesstimation. Winter can be anywhere from NEVER (southern states/Caribbean/Central America) to "September through May" (more northern) to ALWAYS (far far north). To be accurate, the months of winter are the latter portion of December (winter starts on Dec 21) through the latter portion of March (spring starts on March 20).

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Dec 21 or 22 depending on the year is MIDwinter not the start of it.
When I was at school we were taught Winter approximates to Nov/ Dec/ Jan. The actual start and end dates vary according to climatological factors.

The mid-point between the Vernal Equinox and the Winter Solstice would be a good estimate i.e. ~21 Oct - which is close to when we put the clocks back - last Sunday in October.

As for the OPs question there has been no announcement as to the event dates yet but last years was 15 Dec - 03 Jan

That's new-fangled hogwash someone just made up recently. Winter is December, January, and February. March is spring and November is fall.
Just because there's some astronomical significance for those dates doesn't mean there's any call to go changing things to nonsensical with what we're experiencing.

Is it true summer in Ireland starts May 1?

There is a widespread misconception in this country--which extends, I might note, to the makers of most calendars, dictionaries, and encyclopedias--that summer "officially" starts on the day of the summer solstice, June 21 or 22, which is the longest day of the year. Americans also believe (1) that there is some valid scientific reason for doing it that way, and (2) that everybody in the Northern Hemisphere does it that way, and always has.

None of these things is true. So far as I have been able to discover, no scientific or governmental body has ever formally declared that summer starts on the solstice.

"It isn't really clear how the astronomical definition [i.e., summer starts on the solstice] got started," says Kevin Trenberth, a climate researcher at the University of Illinois in Urbana. "Although the sun-earth geometry is clearly the origin of the seasons on earth, it has nothing directly to do with temperature or weather."

He notes that meteorologists define summer simply as June, July, and August. "For practical purposes, the meteorological definition is the best one, being very closely to the [weather] statistics," he says.

In fact, it appears that June 1 was accepted as the beginning of summer in the United States until relatively recently. According to many older reference books, ranging from The American Cyclopedia (1883) to Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1966), summer in the U.S. comprises the months of June, July, and August. Seasons in Britain, for no particularly good reason, start a month earlier.

First Day of Winter - in 2011, it's Dec 22 (sorry, the solstice is Dec 21 and I always forget it's the DAY AFTER, not DAY OF). Sorry Charlie!

EDIT: I want to point out that this all stems from Forbin's comment about the winter event starting "in the winter, some time in December" - and rsclark's response that it will actually be in autumn. Going by the calendar, rsclark is more likely to be correct than Forbin.

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Ha! I was right. For my next trick I'll predict the winning lottery numbers...