Winter solstice

Today is winter solstice, the official start of winter.

I know much of North America has been buried in winter for some time now, but it didn't really count as 'winter' until today!

According to Wikipedia,”the winter solstice occurs at the instant when the Sun's position in the sky is at its greatest angular distance on the other side of the equatorial plane from the observers' hemisphere. Depending on the shift of the calendar, the event of the winter solstice occurs some time between December 20 and December 23 each year in the northern hemisphere, and between June 20 and June 23 in the southern hemisphere, during either the shortest day or the longest night of the year.”

Winter Solstice, also known as Yule, Christmas, and Saturnalia, celebrates the birth of the new Solar year and the beginning of winter. Culturally, this usually brings a festival of inner renewal.

Beginning with science - The Earth is actually nearer the sun in January than it is in June -- by three million miles. Pretty much irrelevant to our planet. What causes the seasons is something completely different. The Earth leans slightly on its axis like a spinning top frozen in one off-kilter position. Astronomers have even pinpointed the precise angle of the tilt. It's 23 degrees and 27 minutes off the perpendicular to the plane of orbit. This planetary pose is what causes all the variety of our climate; all the drama and poetry of our seasons, since it determines how many hours and minutes each hemisphere receives precious sunlight. Translated to English, winter solstice is when because of the earth's tilt, your hemisphere is leaning farthest away from the sun, and therefore the daylight is the shortest.

No one's really sure how long ago humans recognized the winter solstice and began heralding it as a turning point -- the day that marks the return of the sun. One delightful little book written in 1948, 4,000 Years of Christmas, puts its theory right up in the title. The Mesopotamians were first, it claims, with a 12-day festival of renewal, designed to help the god Marduk tame the monsters of chaos for one more year.

Many, many cultures the world over perform solstice ceremonies. At their root, an ancient fear that the failing light would never return unless humans intervened with anxious vigil or antic celebration.

An utterly astounding array of ancient cultures built their greatest architectures -- tombs, temples, cairns and sacred observatories -- so that they aligned with the solstices and equinoxes. Many of us know that

Stonehenge is a perfect marker of both solstices. Today, about 1900 people showed up at Stonehenge to celebrate the solstice!

But not so many people are familiar with Newgrange, a beautiful megalithic site in Ireland. This huge circular stone structure is estimated to be 5,000 years old, older by centuries than Stonehenge, older than the Egyptian pyramids! It was built to receive a shaft of sunlight deep into its central chamber at dawn on winter solstice. Find out more on this incredible ancient site .


Maeshowe, on the Orkney Islands north of Scotland, shares a similar trait, admitting the winter solstice setting sun. It is hailed as "one of the greatest architectural achievements of the prehistoric peoples of Scotland."


Hundreds of other megalithic structures throughout Europe are oriented to the solstices and the equinoxes. The blossoming field of archaeoastronomy studies such sacred sites in the Americas, Asia, Indonesia, and the Middle East. Recent research into the medieval Great Zimbabwe in sub-Saharan Africa (also known as the "African Stonehenge") indicates a similar purpose.

In North America, one of the most famous such sites is the Sun Dagger of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, built a thousand years ago by the Chacoans, ancestors of the Pueblo people. Even cultures that followed a moon-based calendar seemed also to understand the importance of these sun-facing seasonal turning points.

You may have heard of apple wassailing, the medieval winter festival custom of blessing the apple trees with songs, dances, decorations and a drink of cider to ensure their fertility. There's another, more obscure tradition that most certainly predates Christmas, and was probably once a solstice ritual, because it is so linked to the themes of nature's rebirth and fertility. In Romania, there's a traditional Christmas confection called a turta. It is made of many layers of pastry dough, filled with melted sugar or honey, ground walnuts, or hemp seed.

In this tradition, with the making of the cake, families enact a lovely little ceremony to assure the fruitfulness of their orchard come spring. When the wife is in the midst of kneading the dough, she follows her husband into the wintry garden. The man goes from barren tree to tree, threatening to cut each one down. Each time, the wife urges that he spare the tree by saying: "Oh no, I am sure that this tree will be as heavy with fruit next spring as my fingers are with dough this day."

Much of the information above comes from

http://www.candlegrove.com/solstice.html . . . there’s a lot more, if you ‘re interested!

Personally, I’m just happy that it means our sun will be shining a little longer each day now. For a while anyway! Until the next solstice!