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Lady Day
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In the Christian calendar, Lady Day is the Feast of the Annunciation (25 March) and the first of the four traditional Irish and English quarter days. The term derives from Middle English, when some nouns lost their genitive inflections. "Lady" would later gain an -s genitive ending, and therefore the name means "Lady's day."
In England, Lady Day was New Year's Day up to 1752 when, following the move from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar, 1 January became the start of the year. A vestige of this remains in the United Kingdom's tax year, which starts on 6 April, i.e. Lady Day adjusted for the lost days of the calendar change.
The logic of using Lady Day as the start of the year is that it reckons years A.D. from the moment of the Incarnation, which is considered to take place at the moment of the conception of Jesus at the Annunciation rather than at the moment of his birth at Christmas. See also New Year.