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Your birthday · Month 3

Born in March

March is the month of Mars and was the first month of the old Roman year. Its birthstones are the aquamarine and the bloodstone, and its flower is the daffodil.

Feuillet original du calendrier des Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry exposé dérelié au Jeu de Paume du château de Chantilly en juin 2025 : miniature du mois de mars et texte du mois de mai.
Feuillet original du calendrier des Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry exposé dérelié au Jeu de Paume du château de Chantilly en juin 2025 : miniature du mois de mars et texte du mois de mai.Mel22 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

The name and the season

March is named after Mars, the Roman god of war and also a guardian of fields and growth, and it was the first month of the oldest Roman calendar. That is why September, October, November and December still carry the numbers seven to ten. Spring was the season when military campaigns and farming both resumed, and the month was full of rites for Mars, including the dances of his Salian priests. The spring equinox falls around 20 or 21 March, and in England the legal year began on Lady Day, 25 March, until the calendar reform of 1752. Bede gives the Anglo-Saxon name as Hrethmonath, after a goddess Hretha of whom nothing else is known.

Festivals and folklore

The Ides of March, 15 March, were sacred to Jupiter and to the year-goddess Anna Perenna before Caesar's assassination on that day in 44 BCE made them a byword for ill omen. Lady Day on 25 March is the Christian feast of the Annunciation, nine months before Christmas. St Patrick's Day falls on 17 March, and St David's Day, Wales's national day, on 1 March, when Bulgarians also exchange the red-and-white threads called martenitsi to welcome spring. Nowruz, the Persian new year, begins at the equinox, and the Hindu festival of colours, Holi, and the Christian season of Lent often fall in March. Weather proverbs describe a month that 'comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb'.

Birthstone and birth flower

March has two stones in the modern American list: the aquamarine, the sea-blue beryl named for 'sea water', long associated with sailors and calm voyages, and the bloodstone, the green chalcedony with red spots that the older lists give alone. Medieval Christian legend explained the spots as drops of Christ's blood falling on green jasper at the Crucifixion, and older lists sometimes name jasper itself. The month's flower is the daffodil, the herald of spring, with the related jonquil, which in the Victorian language of flowers asked for affection to be returned.

Traits tradition gives to people born this month

The month is shared by Pisces and Aries, the last sign of the zodiac and the first, and popular portraits of March people hold both together. They are traditionally described as imaginative and compassionate on the one hand, energetic and pioneering on the other, people of fresh starts who are moved by ideals and stirred to action. Almanacs warn of moods that change like March weather, of impatience and of a tendency to take on others' troubles. These descriptions belong to folk and astrological tradition; they are not borne out by studies of personality.