Taking a break from Christmas, Santa Claus, and all things holiday, I’m talking today about a topic nobody can disprove or even debate … at least in the northern hemisphere. Tomorrow is the first day of winter. Yes it will be getting colder over the next several weeks but it also will be getting lighter! No longer will we have to eat dinner in the dark without a trip to Barcelona. No longer will we have to wake up in the dark unless you live north of Barrow. No longer will the dark hours of the day outnumber the daylight hours unless you live in a cave. The world is still working its way around the sun and we have proof!

I don’t know what this means but it looks impressive

The winter solstice happens at 5:23pm on December 21 in my neck of the woods, 3:23 after noon or 15:23 as you prefer in Greenwich. (There probably is a really cool way of calculating down to the very second when it actually occurs at your longitude and latitude and probably an even cooler way of figuring what those are. Feel free to search on your own.) Even Mother Nature is excited about this. She has scheduled the Ursalid meteor shower for Friday night, and at double its usual output even! It’s just like a real celebration with fireworks and everything. And to top it all off, there will be a full moon, the Cold Moon or Long Night Moon in Native American lore, on Friday and Saturday. All great things happening up in the sky.

Ok, if you don’t know already I made some assumptions that are flat out wrong. Sunrise won’t start occurring earlier just yet. It takes about 4 weeks for that to happen. (I don’t know why. I used to work in a hospital, not an observatory. I’m sure those people who understand latitude and longitude can help with that too.) And even outside the caves the days are still shorter than the nights and will be until the Vernal Equinox sometime in March but that’s another post. And those meteors. Eh, you’ll probably not get to see much of them with their peak coming along just before dawn on Saturday when that full moon will be its brightest. And that is assuming you’ll get to see anything including the full moon depending on the cloud cover which is one of those things that makes December famous. Remember White Christmas? Where do you think all that white comes from?

But darn it all, the start of winter is here and that means the start of spring is coming and then there will be summer and the pool will be open and I can go sit on the deck with my ice tea and paperback novel and bask in the sun. And nobody is going to disprove or even debate that one either.

Happy Winter!