Happy Solstice!

The event is undeniable. I’m liking the fact that we’ve turned the clock already.

Meanwhile, another undeniable event — Christmas — is coming. (Whether the White House likes it or not.)

 


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

13 responses to “Happy Solstice!”

  1. Judi Thode Avatar
    Judi Thode

    One of my favorites:
    “I heard a bird sing
    In the dark of December
    A magical thing
    And sweet to remember.

    ‘We are nearer to Spring
    Than we were in September,’
    I heard a bird sing
    In the dark of December.”
    – Oliver Herford, I Heard a Bird Sing

  2. John Blake Avatar
    John Blake

    Welcome, Yule (c)

    Against the fall of night this shortest day
    When all lies drear and spare,
    Down twilight paths troop bands of revelers–
    Dancing, singing, raising torches high,
    Striving to kindle golden Sun again.

    So we bedeck Great Halls with boughs,
    Weave crimson holly into ivy wreathes;
    Seized by dire frost, set candle-lamps aglow.
    bare branches yet may burst to green in Spring,
    Flourish anew as rushing thaws begin.

    Listen! Hear age-old carols echo cheer
    As celebrants brave winter’s dark and chill.
    Now friends and family do offer praise,
    Proclaim peace and prosperity at each New Year.
    Let all rejoice, and chorus in good spirits:

    Welcome, Yule!

  3. Hale Adams Avatar
    Hale Adams

    Christmastime is here, by golly
    Disapproval would be folly
    Deck the halls with hunks of holly
    Fill the cup and don’t say “when”.

    Kill the turkeys, ducks, and chickens
    Mix up the punch, and drag out the Dickens
    Even though the prospect sickens
    Brother, here we go again.

    On Christmas Day, you can’t get sore
    Your fellow man you must adore
    There’s time to rob him all the more
    The other three hundred and sixty four.

    Relations, sparing no expense’ll
    Send some useless old utensil
    Like a matching pen and pencil
    Just the thing I need, how nice.

    It doesn’t matter how sincere it
    Is or how heart-felt the spirit
    Sentiment will not endear it
    What’s important is the price.

    Hark the Herald-Tribune sings
    Advertising wondrous things.

    God rest ye merry, merchants
    May ye make the Yuletide pay.

    Angels we have heard on high
    Tell us to go out and buy.

    So……

    Let the raucous sleigh-bells jingle
    Hail our dear old friend Kris Kringle
    Driving his reindeer across the sky…..

    Don’t stand underneath when they fly by!

    — Tom Lehrer, circa 1958

  4. koblog Avatar
    koblog

    Sorry for not waxing all lyrical, but to me winter solstice is one of my favorite days. Here in So Cal it doesn’t mean the longed-for arrival of spring, as we still have flowers blooming and shirtsleeve weather most of the time.

    Solstice is more subtly satisfying than that–it’s the beginning of the lengthening of daylight so I don’t leave and come home from work in the dark, a gradual increase in hopefulness, a grand march toward that most depressing day–the summer stoltice–which, though the longest day and the start of the glorious summer, marks a depressing descent to darkness.

    Yea Winter olstice!

  5. Dippy Avatar
    Dippy

    Wow! It’s almost like the Sun has died and gone to its grave. The giver of life is no more. But, Hark! After 3 days in the grave, the sun awakes, returns to us and preserves our lives. Imagine what stories to explain that our distant ancestors concocted.

  6. Dippy Avatar
    Dippy

    Then there’s the water thing. I mean it can be hard, cold, unforgiving as ice, but soothing, cleansing, lifegiving as water. But then again it can disappear, almost like a ghost. Three different things but the same thing. What a mystery that must have been for them.

  7. joshua Avatar

    I know some of you all here love Miss P, but this is the kind of thing that absolutely discredits her for me. We have much bigger problems right now than jumping on the latest neutral sneeze by Obama as something to use to attack him.

  8. Randy Avatar
    Randy

    It does seem petty of Gov. P to criticize the WH Xmas card. And her comments, while not harsh, were such that there is no doubt she was trying to score political points here.

  9. forrest Avatar
    forrest

    The funny thing is that the Winter Solstice actually occurred on December 21st at 21:30 PST in North America, which is 05:30 CUT (Coordinated Universal Time) December 22nd. This is, of course, when the Earth is at full tilt (heh). At my geographic location the sun reached zenith at 12:08:18 PST at an altitude of only 19.1055555555555556 degrees, the lowest of the year, on December 21st. The rather stupid and lazy media and a surprising number of online “scientific” publications managed to get the Solstice date wrong for North America by simply looking at the CUT time/date. If you wish to verify, simply download Stellarium, an open source and wonderful astronomy program, set up your location and run the program through solar noon (when the sun is at 180 degrees due South) from December 20th to the 22nd and record the sun’s maximum altitude for those days. You’ll find that it was indeed the lowest on the 21st in North America. I also used an M2 Aiming Circle to physically observe the event and found that my observations coincided with Stellarium’s within one mil (0.05625 degrees) of error.

  10. Eric Scheie Avatar

    The Palin link was meant to entertain, not argue.

    As to the time issue, I am in the Eastern Time Zone, and I believe the Solstice took place on December 22 here. I observed its passing on the 22d as I am five hours behind UTC — which is called “U.S. time”:

    http://www.time.gov/timezone.cgi?UTC/s/0/java

    So, at 05:30 CUT on the 22nd, it was 00:30 here.

    I’m not on PST, much as I would like to be.

  11. […] hate to say anything definitive for fear of contradiction (well actually I enjoy a good fight – sometimes even a bad one – but you may know how […]

  12. joshua Avatar

    Understood! I take moral responsibility for the above words! Happy Christmas Eve to all!

  13. forrest Avatar
    forrest

    Yup, In The Eastern time zone it was the 22nd, I had thought of that last night.