...That sort of went out of the window the first moment the writers needed to refer to a past event. Which I guess was in "Conscience of the King", with Kodos doing this-or-that on "stardate" despite being presumed dead long before Kirk's mission began.
The thing about New Years is that those on Earth probably don't coincide with the stardate ones, even if one stardate year (that is, a thousand units) is one Earth year long. After all, while we never get a solid stardate for a Christmas, we can see it's late summer in the vineyards of France in TNG "Family", just after the last three digits roll to zeroes. And annual Earth events like the Festival of Light or Thanksgiving or Halloween seem to fall on specific dates in synch with the Hollywood season which begins right after the summer...
Of course, a stardate in the X200 range then ought to be in mid-autumn and not May 11.
Timo Saloniemi
