Astronomical summer and meteorological summer aren’t the same thing. (Northern-hemisphere-centric site.)
English is like that.
Because it’s not the midpoint of summer. It’s roughly the time of maximum insolation in the N hemisphere, but peak temperatures are much later because stuff (principally water) takes time to warm up and cool down.
Well it’s definitely not the start of summer either, going by hours of daylight. If anything, it’s the point at which the days start getting shorter.
I guess it is better than working for unobservant Jewish people:
“Oops, I just noticed, it is after 6:00. We should have closed already!”
“What? This is Friday?”
Yes, exactly.
It’s the day of longest sunlight (in the Northern Hemisphere), after which the days do indeed start getting shorter. And the winter solstice is the day of shortest sunlight, after which the days start getting longer. Reverse the seasons for the southern hemisphere.
The days at the midpoint are called equinoxes, because they’re the days on which day and night are of equal length. Solstices are ‘sun standing still’, because daylength changes hardly at all at that point, and very slowly for some time before and after; it’s changing much faster around the equinoxes.
So… you guys are saying that after the longest day, there isn’t a longer day? Who would’ve thunk it.
Now what happens? Now the Sun begins its long, slow, descent into oblivion, at the end of which we will be back where we started in a slough of cold, fog, darkness, and endless December gloom. Just as every one of us is declining remorselessly toward death and a return to the cold, lifeless earth from whence we came. That’s what happens now.
How does that work, from a logistics sense? Most stores have Open/Closed hours posted - what does your store’s door sign say?
Sigh. That’s pretty much the way I look at things.
Sort of depressing. We still have snow at least in the shady areas. Got two inches yesterday. Gonna be a short summer.
I’ll give you a winter prediction: It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be gray, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.
Happy Groundhog Day. 
" Thank you for shopping at B&H Photo. Open every day of the year except Friday afternoons and Saturdays. "
My fondest Summer Solstice memory isn’t connected to rituals at all. I got hired to shoot a commercial for a video game related to a Batman movie. We were shooting in an alley off of…hmm…Houston street maybe? Anyway, by luck the gig was booked for the Solstice night. THE shortest amount of night time in the year.
We didn’t roll film until, what, 9pm? Later? And the sky started to have a bit of light pollution well before 5am. We barely covered the shot list ! Not that doing it a few days before or after would have made a real difference, but still. On the night, it was amusing.
Winter is coming.
It makes a certain amount of weather-sense. Day before yesterday, the days stopped getting longer and began getting shorter instead. But the days remain long for quite some time, meaning that the earth gets baked in the sun and gains overall heat from one day to the next for quite some time to come, and that in turn means the days keep on getting hotter even while the days get shorter. The blast-furnace days of peak summer heat are still a ways off.
Oh, the stories I have on that subject We close the doors and the aisles 15 minutes before closing, and yet people still think they should be able to come in and shop. We make announcements. I’m willing to do “last cash” (last register with cash in it, taking cash payments) and people still think they should be able to stay forever.
We change the sign and the telephone message every two weeks, indicating we close fifteen minutes earlier (or later in the spring) than the previous week.
Mostly it’s getting people checked out and out of the store.
For hop growers, the summer solstice triggers forming hop cones and ripening. Hops, used to for bittering in beer, and anti septic properties, ideally are pruned back and then let loose to hit their maximum height (between 20-30 feet) on the summer solstice. Let em grow to early, then they peak too soon and don’t have a good yield. Let em grow too late, they don’t reach maximum height. I’m in a primo hop growing latitude, and where I’m at that means let the hops go at about 15 May. Now that my 3 hop plants have grown up the decorative trellis’ in front of my house, it’s time to start producing hop buds and ripen.
Nitpick: this is not exactly correct. The equinoxes are when the equator aligns with the sun (it is directly overhead on the equator at noon). Outside the tropics, day and night are not exactly the same length at the equinox: the point at which this happens is called the “equilux”. Where I live, the spring equilux occurs several days before the equinox, the autumn equilux a few days after. This varies by latitude.
Not to be confused with the legendary esquilax: a horse with the head of a rabbit, and the body of a rabbit.
I was staying at a hotel in Brae on Shetland, just above the 60N Parallel, a couple of weeks ago before the Solstice. It was still light out when I went to bed shortly before 11 pm. It was dawn when I woke briefly a little past 2 am. If there was any night in the 3 hours between, I missed it completely.