A special winter solstice

As we were driving home I noticed the full moon hanging low in the sky, vapours of cloud across its pale face like wisps of a scarf. I’d already mentioned to the family that today was the shortest day of the year, heading towards summer tomorrow! I didn’t however think about the fact it was a full moon and the shortest day… the next time this is going to happen is 2029… I wonder if I will remember, or if I’ll be surprised all over again?

The winter solstice (or hibernal solstice), also known as midwinter, occurs when one of the Earth’s poles has its maximum tilt away from the Sun. It happens twice yearly, once in each hemisphere (Northern and Southern). For that hemisphere, the winter solstice is the day with the shortest period of daylight and longest night of the year, when the sun is at its lowest daily maximum elevation in the sky.^[1] At the pole, there is continuous darkness or twilight around the winter solstice. Its opposite is the summer solstice

For us in our insulated world. with light and warmth whenever we want it at a touch of a switch – or these days by asking Alexa/Siri/Google to turn the lights on, the shortest day is not really very relevant, We go from ‘ah, the nights are drawing in’, to ”ooh, the evenings are getting longer…’ without it really making too much difference. Even driving, streets are well-lit and vehicle lights are so good we can keep the dark at bay. In the UK our shortest day is between seven and eight hours long; in Bodø in Norway it’s a mere 49 minutes… hard to imagine for us southerners, a day lasting only 49 minutes. In the southern hemisphere on the same date, in Invercargill in New Zealand, the day is a magnificent 15 hours and 49 minutes!

From earliest times people have celebrated this change of season, and in many countries there still are all sorts of festivities. and we think of Yule as being Christmas, but really it’s the old pagan midwinter festival which would have lasted twelve nights. Now we have Christmas, and a week later New Year… some of us still have a yule log though!